I just checked at Lulu.com and it seems I've now sold my first couple of books. Yippiee! I immediately also noticed a small drawback. With the Finnish book I'd receive the orders into my personal mailbox, and write a personal thank you note to the buyer. Now I have no idea who it is that is buying the book. Of course, that's the inevitable price of automation.

Hi again. Guess it's up to me now to keep this blog rolling with interesting Open Source stuff.

I just got home from this autumns first Open Tuesday event (Club Ahjo, Helsinki). They celebrated Linux 15 year birthday with a panel on where Open Source is going. I celebrated the publication of the English edition with a glass of red wine, sponsored by IBM (Open Bar). Kind of like that guy on the cover, talking to the penguin.

September 4th, 2006
For immediate publication

New book introduces Open Source ideology and business models, entertaining and in layman terms

'Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source' is a newly published book about Open Source ideology and business models. It is divided into 4 parts covering the topic from different angels. Part one introduces the general concept of openness, part two Open Source ideology and values, along with prominent personalities like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, part three is an exhaustive study in Linux businesses and their business models and finally part four is an introduction into the emerging trend of applying Open Source ideology and methods to non-technical fields, like Wikipedia or Creative Commons.

Hah!

When I finally got home today after a long day at work, there it was. My copy from Lulu.com had arrived and it was perfect. So I've approved it, and now all I need to do is to write the press release and then go brag about this to all my friends!

Finally! We are ready to launch. After spending 5 evenings copypasting and adding <em></em> tags around italicised words, the book is also now available in a browsable Drupal book format.

Uh oh. Finalizing always takes time. I thought once Sara had the book translated, the editor would just need a couple of days to finish it. Wrong. Who would've guessed, an editor actually does some real work on the book! Helen was a very good editor. Usually I just get angry when an editor points out all unclear or outright bad parts of my masterpiece, but with Helen we got along quite nicely.

This is an old blog entry I copied from the Finnish book's site mainly to use as filling while I was designing the layout for this site. Since it might be an interesting read, I'll just leave it here. Hope you enjoy...

While Conan visits Finland as I write, last Thursday there was a chance to meetup with an even more interesting American. Earlier I had bumped into my old friend and former collague Ilija Lazarov, who informed me that the Nr 1 Open Source guy in Redmond, Bill Hilf would be visiting Rantasauna at my former university. So, did I really want to spend an evening listening to Microsoft's opinion on Open Source? Sure, that might be interesting. And no, Bill Hilf is not the "Get The Facts" man, I don't think I would have been interested in that kind of stuff. All in all, there would be a sauna, food and drinks courtesy of Microsoft, and if nothing else, I could meet two old friends Aali and Ilija, so the worst case scenario was good enough to go there. Luckily, Bill himself turned out to be a very interesting guy as well. He seems to be involved in anything MS does with Open Source, and lots of high-level stuff, like relationships with the EU Commission. Apparently, he came up with the idea to offer the source code instead of documentation. ("Not that I would say in public.")