Fun- The Textbook Authors Meet @PyCon2015

Camera and you’re fine.

Is it working?

It’s working.

Are you selfie-ing?

Yeah, this is my selfie cam.

My Gimble selfie cam.

It works great.

Yeah.

So this way I can tape my meeting of Allen Downey.

Sweet.

That’s gonna be sweet.

Moments.

The moment that I meet Allen.

Palpable.

It is.

Very cool indeed, I’d say.

Folks.

That’s Allen Downey, who started the whole Think Java, Think Python revolution.

Back in 1999, and I’m going to meet him now the first time.

You can ask him that question that I should have asked him a long time ago.

So what are your thoughts, Jeff, before we meet the great Allen Downey?

But you’ve met Alan before?

I have.

This is my first time.

But it’s always exciting.

Exactly.

I’m Charles Severance.

Charles, it’s great to see you.

We’re co-authors.

Yes?

We’ve never met in person.

We talked on the phone. This is the famous Jeff Elkner, of course.

Made famous by this guy.

Well everybody got made famous.

So the first question I was asking Jeff and he doesn’t even know the answer to is why did you choose GFDL back in 1999?

That was before Creative Commons, before OCW, before everything.

What possessed you?

You know, actually the first version of the book, I put it under the GNU Free

GFDL.

Not not- GFDL.

The GPL.

Oh, you did the GPL.

Because I didn’t even know about the GFTL.

And then somebody got ahold of you, from MIT.

And they said wait a minute, this is documentation, this is not code.

You should use this other license, and so I switched.

And then when Creative Commons came along, some of those licenses has been useful.

Actually part of the reason that working with O’Reilly has worked out very well.

I do things usually under a non-commercial Creative Commons license, and then that’s kind of a compromise.

Yeah.

So it’s not ideal.

But those are the details, so why Though the non-commmercial’s I think a beautiful thing.

Actually Creative Commons is thinking about getting rid of it.

Yeah.

And I’m sad about that, because I think it is a fine middle ground.

E-copies can delivered free and no one feels bad about that.

Print copies you make money off of.

So it’s pretty cool.

I agree I think there’s a nice use case for it.

So have you ever tried to count the number of derivative books of Think Python?

No.

Do you think it’s 100, 200, 300?

I don’t think.

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist Java version.

If you go all the way back.

There are a number of English language books that are modified versions.

Including mine.

There are translations into

I count those as separate ones.

Yep.

But like Runestone, like Brad Miller’s stuff, Active more, I guess.

Do you have an interactive version?

No no I just have the Python for Informatics print and e-version.

Yeah, that’s I did that many years ago, and then I fought with Cambridge Press.

Remember that?

Yes.

Remember those calls?

Yeah.

So, but that’s, but like why did you give it away?

I mean, it wasn’t so cool in 1999 just to give books away.

It was not normal.

True.

No.

But that’s the question that I wanted.

Can we pause?

I do want to, I want to finish signing books

Ok.

So we have to talk later.

Ok.

Okay, we’ll get back to this.