RE: hold off until the copyright can be clarified

Neil W. Van Dyke wrote:

>   1. I'll defer to whatever Anton's and Noel's assessment of the
>      copyright issues is.  They're two of the most prominent Cookbook
>      contributors, and both seem very interested in seeing a print book
>      happen, so our interests are aligned there.  If they're comfortable
>      with going live to c.l.s now, so am I.

Thanks.  Noel has indicated he wants to clarify the copyright question, of
course.

I should mention that I don't really know what our chances of getting a
mainstream publisher are.  My position really comes from trying to maximize
those chances, assuming we want to try for that.  If others were saying
"well, we don't really need a printed book anyway", there'd be no reason to
pursue the current approach.  The same would go if we all agreed that we
don't care about potentially closing ourselves off from mainstream
publishers.

>   2. If O'Reilly is our first-choice publisher (just a guess, but they'd
>      be my personal first choice for maximum exposure and prestige among
>      who I imagine is our target audience),

Is their Lisp ban no longer in effect?

>      why don't we just ask through our contacts and/or
>      put together a book proposal?  Or approach any other
>      of our first-choice publishers?  Simply *knowing* what
>      the publisher wants would render moot some of the
>      controversy. :)

Yes, it would, wouldn't it?  However, I thought that putting together a
proposal at this point would make for an unnecessary delay.  For anything
short of that, and with anyone other than O'Reilly (who has some experience
with this sort of thing), I'm not sure how good an answer we're going to
get, without getting into real negotiations.  The way I would normally
approach something like this would be to establish interest in the book
first, and deal with the license issues a bit later on.  Starting out with a
potential legal problem is much more likely to get a negative response.

>      I might have a couple good ORA contacts, if we
>      don't already have one.

I have minimal contacts in this area.  We could ask Matthias F. for contacts
at the publisher(s) he had in mind.  I have some very old contacts at Wiley
and at Wrox which I might be able to reactivate.

> It's not too late to catch West Coast US hackers who are
> killing an hour at work reading Usenet before sneaking
> off early to the 3-day weekend. :)

Have a little respect for a good filibuster!  ;-0

I wonder how many Schemers there are in Hawaii...?

Anton



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