A friend of mine wrote a book about a collection of well known open source php applications. In each chapter he discusses one and explains what one can do with it and how to install it. It’s a very popular title. Bad? I really don’t think so.

Furthermore, just because y’all are skeptical that he can do it doesn’t mean he can’t write it from scratch. No, it doesn’t matter if he looked at your guides. No, it doesn’t matter that those guides are copyrighted. Regardless of whether he writes it from scratch or not (notwithstanding actual copying), he has every right to create the book.

Who cares if people in the WordPress community think someone else is better qualified? Last time I checked, the best qualified does not have the only right to do something.

If there is no market, it will flop. If your copyrighted works are copied, then you have remedies.

As a disinterested third party, it seems Mark has his proverbial panties in a bunch.

What Mark and this is about is the fact that I will go write a book, taking all my information from someone who’s written it all out online. So it’s not about the code, it’s about how to manipulate the code to do what you want. It’s the way you backup stuff, how you tweak the quicktags, that sort of thing. These are GUIDES, not the code that we’re talking about here.

He wants to write about it? Go for it, however chances are if he’s interested in doing it for WordPress he’d be checking out someone who’s spent the better part of 8 months building and compiling this information.

has anyone seen all of the Linux books one can buy? Do you not think that the various scripts and whatnot within them were all magically gleamed out of air? Very few are original, and while a “chunk” of code might belong to someone, php like perl, bash, etc.. is opensource.

Furthermore, WordPress is released under the GPL, and the GPL is clear…

Using one little function that is contained within WordPress makes
your own code subject to the GPL, and requires that it be distributed the same way.

The GPL also allows the sale of an item that’s been GPL’d,

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http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.htm

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Though you might not like the idea Mark for any number of reasons, anyone that wanted could write a book about WordPress and use any number of scripts, and would prolly be within their legal right to do so, Furthermore, if O’Reilly, for instance were to take up such an idea, I am sure they would be quite clear from the outset on where they stood legally.

As for who would buy such a book, theres no telling. Linux books go over well and there is clearly a metric ton of Linux stuff on the net for free. People like books, theyre tangible, There are other examples– HTML books, Perl books, you name it, its there. Hell, look at all the books that have been made on Windows.

Oh dear, that’s really not good. Marky seems to be a bit unhappy about what’s going on with people using his guides to make money. Mark has spends HOURS on the forums helping people out whenever he can. He’s also responsible for both writing up and …

http://blogbinders.com/default.asp

The setup of the cafepress site shouldn’t be too much hassle, and as for the content, well I’ll leave the conversations between you and the rest of the dev team to see what you want to do, and whether this should be an official thing or whatever. That way what you do with the money is your issue. You could use it for paying towards the bandwidth on this site etc.

I don’t think anyone would begrudge you getting paid to run your site by the guides you provide. It’s something you’ve obviously spent a lot of time on, so getting something back to continue to give something isn’t really unreasonable.

I know it’s not about the money, but this is the situation, either get a book by Larry, OR get a book by one of the dev team that has actually made a contribution and continues to do so on the forums every day. Just a thought. You know how reach me :)