The first thing you need to understand and observe is that
my post did not say: "I want to gobble up all the info
here and act as if I knew it all and write a book." It was
patently clear in my initial post that I was going to
allocate royalties as a function of contribution to content.
And that means I would do so regardless of whether I was
legally bound to or not, because I am ethically bound to
do it regardless of what I might be able to abscond away
with legally... I have been benefitting from free software
since 1987 and have yet to help out as much as I have been
helped and now I think I finally can do something.
And responding to another post as well as a sentiment
expressed by KM, Just because there is one
Perl Cookbook does not mean there cannot be another one
with just as much content on topics completely uncovered
by the first one. I mean, no-one complains when the
900th beginner perl book teaching the same things comes
out, but the second I want to create a book with the same
focus as the Cookbook, but new and fresh and highly
useful content, people are up in arms.
And besides, the
Cookbook and Programming Perl are largely similar even
exact verbatim wordings of online docs widely available.
They did the same thing why shouldn't we? Just think of
how many more people will come to PerlMonks.ORG if we
put out a book.
And finally, I have just had a mindspring. For a long time,
I have wanted to cut out what I see as WASTE in the Perl
Community. We have 25 modules that do text templating
with little uniqueness among them. 5 or so that allow for
easy navigation of complex nests of array and hashrefs.
We have PerlMonks, PerlArchive, CPAN, Use.perl.org,
effectiveperl.org, and
news.perl.org and should I mention Matts SCript ARchive?
... in short what we have is a flagrant violation of the
first rule of software engineering: never re-invent the
wheel.
So gentlemen and women (or is that gentlemonks as suggested
by my office-mate), let us decide on how best to navigate the
current state of affairs in the Perl Community in keeping
with the spirit of free software as espoused by the likes
of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Larry Wall. And
we could consider vroom a pioneer in the field of
free information sharing.
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