When I got back to Oakland, I called around to various journalist friends and acquaintances. I recounted my predicament. Most upbraided me for giving up too much ground to Stallman in the preinterview negotiation. A former j-school professor suggested I ignore Stallman's "hypocrite" comment and just write the story. Reporters who knew of Stallman's media-savviness expressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it's your call.
I decided to put the book on the back burner. Even with the interviews, I wasn't making much progress. Besides, it gave me a chance to speak with Tracy without running things past Henning first. By Christmas we had traded visits: she flying out to the west coast once, me flying out to New York a second time. The day before New Year's Eve, I proposed. Deciding which coast to live on, I picked New York. By February, I packed up my laptop computer and all my research notes related to the Stallman biography, and we winged our way to JFK Airport. Tracy and I were married on May 11. So much for failed book deals.
During the summer, I began to contemplate turning my interview notes into a magazine article. Ethically, I felt in the clear doing so, since the original interview terms said nothing about traditional print media. To be honest, I also felt a bit more comfortable writing about Stallman after eight months of radio silence. Since our telephone conversation in September, I'd only received two emails from Stallman. Both chastised me for using "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" in a pair of articles for the web magazine Upside Today. Aside from that, I had enjoyed the silence. In June, about a week after the New York University speech, I took a crack at writing a 5,000-word magazine-length story about Stallman. This time, the words flowed. The distance had helped restore my lost sense of emotional perspective, I suppose.
In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call from Henning. He told me that O'Reilly & Associates, a publishing house out of Sebastopol, California, was interested in the running the Stallman story as a biography. The news pleased me. Of all the publishing houses in the world, O'Reilly, the same company that had published Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, seemed the most sensitive to the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. As a reporter, I had relied heavily on the O'Reilly book Open Sources as a historical reference. I also knew that various chapters of the book, including a chapter written by Stallman, had been published with copyright notices that permitted redistribution. Such knowledge would come in handy if the issue of electronic publication ever came up again.
Sure enough, the issue did come up. I learned through Henning that O'Reilly intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part of its new Safari Tech Books Online subscription service. The Safari user license would involve special restrictions,1 Henning warned, but O'Reilly was willing to allow for a copyright that permitted users to copy and share and the book's text regardless of medium. Basically, as author, I had the choice between two licenses: the Open Publication License or the GNU Free Documentation License.
I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication License (OPL)See "The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0" (June 8, 1999).
http://opencontent.org/openpub/
gives readers the right to reproduce and distribute a
work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or
electronic," provided the copied work retains the Open
Publication License. It also permits modification of a
work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the
Open Publication License includes a number of options,
which, if selected by the author, can limit the
creation of "substantively modified" versions or
book-form derivatives without prior author approval.
The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL),See "The GNU Free Documentation
License: Version 1.1"
(March, 2000).
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
meanwhile, permits the copying and distribution of a
document in any medium, provided the resulting work
carries the same license. It also permits the
modification of a document provided certain conditions.
Unlike the OPL, however, it does not give authors the
option to restrict certain modifications. It also does
not give authors the right to reject modifications that
might result in a competitive book product. It does
require certain forms of front- and back-cover
information if a party other than the copyright holder
wishes to publish more than 100 copies of a protected
work, however.
In the course of researching the licenses, I also made sure to visit the GNU Project web page titled "Various Licenses and Comments About Them."See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the Open Publication License. Stallman's critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability of an author to select either one of the OPL's options to restrict modification. If an author didn't want to select either option, it was better to use the GFDL instead, Stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the nonselected options popping up in modified versions of a document.