Fun- The Textbook Authors Meet @PyCon

Another camera, and you’re fine.

I don’t know.

Is it working?

Is it working?

It’s working.

Are you selfieing?

Yeah, this is my selfie cam.

My Gimbal selfie cam.

It works great.

Yeah.

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

Sweet.

That’s gonna be sweet.

The moments.

The moment that I meet Allen.

That’s how helpful.

It is.

Very cool indeed actually.

Folks, that’s Allen Downey, who started the whole Think Java, Think Python, revolution

back 1999 and I’m gonna meet him now.

For the first time.

And you can ask him that question, that I should have asked him a long time ago.

Right?

So what are your thoughts, Jeff?

Right before we meet the great Allen Downey?

I’m excited, I’m excited, I’m excited.

Okay.

It’s very exciting, but you’ve met Allen before.

I have, I have.

This is my first time.

But it’s always exciting.

Exactly

Hi.

It’s Allen Downey.

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.

I’m thrilled.

Jeff, it’s nice to meet you.

Made famous by this guy.

Yeah, well we all, everybody got made famous.

That’s right.

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.

Yeah.

What possessed you?

You know actually the first version of the book I put it under the Gnu three.

GFDL?

No, not.

GPL

The GPL.

Oh, you did GPL?

Because I didn’t even know about the FTL.

And then somebody got a hold of you from MIT.

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

You should have used this other license and so I switched.

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

Yep.

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

Yeah.

I do things usually under a non commercial Yeah.

Creative Commons license.

And then that’s kind of a compromise.

Yep.

It’s maybe not ideal.

But those are the details the why questions.

No the non-commercial’s I think a beautiful thing Yeah.

And actually Creative Commons is thinking about getting rid of it.

I’m sad about that, because I think it’s a fine middle ground, for e-copies can be 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 huge 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 it’s 100.

How to think like a computer scientist, Java version.

The original.

If you go all the way back.

Yeah, all the way.

Java’s the original.

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

Including mine.

yep.

We need to get that data.

There are translations into other languages.

I count those as separate ones.

Yep.

But like Runestone like Brad Miller’s stuff.

But then there’s the interactive one.

The interactive ones, yes.

And then his book now.

Do you have an interactive version?

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

Yeah, but that’s been out for a while.

Yeah.

I did that many years ago.

And then I fought with Cambridge Press, remember that?

Yes.

Remember those calls?

So but 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.

That’s the question I had.

Can we pause?

I do wanna, I wanna finish signing books so these folks are

Okay, so we’ll have to talk later.

Okay, okay, we’ll get back to this.

Let’s talk more.