Explore Flask is now in the public domain | Hacker News Reader

Explore Flask is now in the public domain

github.com

141 pointsthejosh23 comments

I don't see anything in that repo that says that the work has been licensed as a work in the public domain.

Works licensed under Creative Commons, GPL, MIT, BSD, etc. are not in the public domain. Public domain is something else, entirely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

EDIT: found it: "Contributions are all placed in the public domain like the rest of the text."

It would be cool if the author jumped in and explained the choice to use the public domain.

The license is also stated on the index page https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask/blob/master/source/... (live page: http://exploreflask.com/). He talks a little about this reasoning on that page:

> I finally released the book, after spending almost a year working on it. Almost immediately I was tired of managing distribution and limiting the book's audience by putting it behind a paywall. I didn't write a book to run a business, I wrote it to put some helpful content out there and help grow the Flask community.

> […]

> In the spirit of open source software, I'm placing all of the content in this book in the public domain.

This is from the email Robert Picard sent...

Hi everyone!

I've decided that I didn't write this book to run a business. I'm tired of managing distribution channels and looking at sales stats. I want this book to be open and available for everyone.

I've released Explore Flask into the public domain and I've spent the last week converting it to Sphinx so I could make it available at http://exploreflask.com.

The project is going to be maintained in the GitHub repository at https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask. I look forward to working with the book as a living document into the future.

Thank you to everyone who purchased the 1.0 release of the book. The sales numbers weren't huge, but they allowed me to compensate my awesome editor, Will Kahn-Greene for all of his hard work.

Another thanks to everyone who purchased the pre-release. That money kept me afloat before I landed the great job I'm currently enjoying!

Feel free to get involved on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome!

- Robert

>Feel free to get involved on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome!

This is the future of technical authoring. Gone are the days when a book is published full of bugs and other mistakes.

If there's a bug in a e-book then it's a pull-request away from being fixed.

Now if only e-readers could display tech books better...

Please use CC0[0], not "public domain".

Several countries (esp. in Europe) do not recognize the concept of the public domain (and/or limit an individual's right to place their content in the public domain "prematurely")[1]. In these countries, declaring your code to be in the public domain does nothing, whereas using a CC0 license is a more legally defensible way of achieving the same goal (allowing others to use your work freely without fear that you could later revoke that right).

[0] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Dedicating_works...

http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html

Excellent resource. I supported the Kickstarter. Helped review and edit the alpha and beta versions. And I just submitted my first pull - https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask/pull/43

Highly recommended!

I'm in the middle of making a Flask application and this is just what I needed, thank you for your work!

I would love a physical copy of the book. Is one in the works?

Make your own - http://www.lulu.com/

I can make a PDF fairly easily. Here's a sample - https://github.com/realpython/about/blob/master/deployment.p...

I'm surprised there's no epub version. (It reflows more nicely on my phone.) Is this something others have an interest in, an oversight, or intentional?

The guy spent ages converting it to sphinx already just to give the thing out. Help him out and file a PR, I'm sure he'd appreciate it.

Heh - I was doing that! I tried building the HTML version under Ubuntu 12.04, failed, and I'm working on getting 14.04 up and running.

Edit: I hadn't seen the email text about Sphinx, so it was news that he'd been working on converting it. Sorry!

Ok, I added some background on prerequisites for building HTML and ePub, and filed a pull request.

I posted an ePub - https://github.com/pronoiac/explore-flask/blob/add-epub/asse... - though no pull request, because I'd already filed a related PR. Wait, should I file another?

You can create one yourself easily with Pandoc, then PUSH the convertor to the repo for others. :)

How about a nice PDF? Example - https://github.com/realpython/about/blob/master/deployment.p...

Not bad! Did you use rst2pdf or go through TeX?

I'm trying to decide where to upload my ePub to - the main Github repo, or the exploreflask.com repo. Thoughts?

Is this Python 3-ready? Looks pretty good from a very short peek, but don't have the time to actually read it for a while.

From the preface:

Since this book is meant to provide practical advice, I think it makes sense to write with the assumption of Python 2. Specifically, I’ll be writing the book with Python 2.7 in mind. Future updates may very well change this to evolve with the Flask community, but for now 2.7 is where we stand.

Purely from personal experience (I know, I know), Flask's Python 3 support is solid. With a little bit of intuition, I'm sure any Py3-related problems from following the book could be worked around.

I love the illustrator's name.

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