A parting gift
 

Hello!

I have become increasingly unreliable concerning my activities within
the Gentoo developer community during the last year. Now I finally
arrived at the point where I consider the only reasonable solution to
leave the Gentoo team. The final drop has been the fact that I
promised Sebastian the next layman release. But week after week I did
not find the time to work on the next version thus failing the
promise.

With my commercial endeavours within the Kolab and Horde communities
thriving I have to be realistic: The workload won't suddenly fade
during the next year(s?). I would have liked to include Gentoo into
the portfolio I get paid for but I was unable to achieve that. Chances
are that I would be even less responsive concerning Gentoo in the
future.

This is no easy decision for me as I do like Gentoo and feel strongly
for some of the stuff I did for Gentoo. It is not easy to drop these
projects. I would have made the choice earlier in order to clarify the
situation if I would not care that much about Gentoo. But I left
people with an unresponsive maintainer this way and I'm sorry for
that.

There is one final thing I'd like to leave as a parting gift to the
Gentoo community.

As some of you may know I wrote a german book about Gentoo. When I
initially started the project I asked the publisher if there would be
any possibility to produce a free version of that book, too. Writing
about free software feels strange to me if the things I write are not
free. But books are not software and I had to accept the commercial
realities of the project at that time.

But I mentioned above that things for my little one-man-company are
going well and so I did buy the rights to my book back. It has now
been published under a free license and is available for download at

https://www.opensourcepress.de/openbooks.html

The latex source for the book is here:

http://github.com/wrobel/book-gentoo/tree

Time to say goodbye. Sigh...


--
Gunnar Wrobel Gentoo Developer
__________________C_o_n_t_a_c_t__________________

Mail: wrobel@gentoo.org
WWW: http://www.gunnarwrobel.de
IRC: #gentoo-web at freenode.org
_________________________________________________

A parting gift
 

On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 09:15:10AM +0100, Gunnar Wrobel wrote:
> ... I did buy the rights to my book back.
Wait, you don't keep the 'rights' to *your* book when it's published?

--
Jake Todd
// If it isn't broke, tweak it!

A parting gift
 

Hi,

Jacob Todd <jaketodd422@gmail.com>:

> On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 09:15:10AM +0100, Gunnar Wrobel wrote:
> > ... I did buy the rights to my book back.
> Wait, you don't keep the 'rights' to *your* book when it's published?

You sell the publishing rights for a period of time.

V-Li

--
Christian Faulhammer, Gentoo Lisp project
<URL:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode

<URL:http://gentoo.faulhammer.org/>

A parting gift
 

ons 2009-12-02 klockan 17:55 +0000 skrev Jacob Todd:
> On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 09:15:10AM +0100, Gunnar Wrobel wrote:
> > ... I did buy the rights to my book back.
> Wait, you don't keep the 'rights' to *your* book when it's published?
>

No this is a common thing with books. Remember some time ago in sweden
some writers wanted to republish their book, but their current publisher
did not want to. Created some spectacle when they did go to another
publisher only to find out about this clause in the contract with their
first publisher.