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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