Hooray for O'Reilly, who are giving away ebooks half-price in celebration of the FSF's "Day against DRM"!
When I was first speaking to publishers about this book, I was a bit nervous. I'm very intersed in digital rights and copyright reform, and in fact I'm a reasonably active member of Pirate Party UK (or I was until this little project sucked up all my spare time!)... Could I find a publishing deal that would be compatible with my views? One of my colleagues in the German Pirate Party came in for a lot of criticism when she wrote a book and discovered her publisher sending out DMCA notices to filesharing sites...
I support a manifesto that asks for a 10-year limit on copyright, and for all non-commercial filesharing to be legal. Could I find a publishing deal that was at all consistent with that? The first publisher I spoke to was having none of it...
That's why I was so glad when O'Reilly said they had absolutely no problem with me distributing the book under a CC license... After a bit of haggling, they even agree to a clause in the contract that would say that the book would revert to a CC-0 Public Domain license after 10 years. Even if you think the policy of 10 years is too short for many domains, it's certainly enough for commercial exploitation of a technical book.
So, hooray for my beloved publisher, hooray for Creative Commons, and hooray for the FSF!