O'Reilly Releases DocBook: The Definitive Guide
Under the GNU License
by Norman Walsh, Leonard Muellner
09/10/2001
This change in licensing allows DocBook users
worldwide to update, translate, and reuse the official reference documentation
for DocBook. The XML sources for the book have been checked into the DocBook
project at SourceForge. The DocBook project is an open source project
to develop and revise DocBook-based software and documentation.
The Free Software Foundation's Bradley Kuhn said, "We
believe that books on Free Software need to be Free (as in freedom). We
are going to encourage people to buy this free manual from O'Reilly, and
thus reward both the publisher and the authors for contributing to the
community. We look forward to such contributions in the future."
The first edition of the book was published by O'Reilly in October 1999. A
free online version has been available since that date on Oasis
(Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and on
DocBook.org. The
book was also translated into French by Sebastien Blondeel and Pierre
Zanettacci and published by Editions
O'Reilly in Paris earlier this year.
If you are an author of structured documents, and not a developer, Michael
Smith says Don't
Learn XML. In this article, find out why he recommends an alternate
course of study: DocBook.
DocBook: The Definitive Guide is the official reference documentation
for DocBook in the open source community and elsewhere. The most recent,
alpha version of DocBook: The Definitive Guide is
available from the Definitive Guide home page. Aside from the
change in copyright, this version contains updates to the latest version
of DocBook 4.0 as well as contributions by Bob Stayton, a member of the
DocBook software group. For more information about DocBook,
the best source is the official DocBook home page at OASIS.
O'Reilly has indicated that it plans to keep this book in print and they
also plan to publish revised versions. Future editions will
also conform to the GNU FDL v1.1 or later.
Norman Walsh
Norman Walsh is an engineer in the XML Technology Center at Sun
Microsystems, Inc. Norm is an active participant in a number of
standards efforts worldwide, including the XML Core; XSL and XML
Schema Working Groups of the World Wide Web Consortium; the OASIS
XSLT Conformance and RELAX NG Committees; the OASIS Entity
Resolution Committee, for which he is the editor; and the OASIS
DocBook Technical Committee, which he chairs.
Leonard Muellner is O'Reilly's Manager of Production Tools, and he
has been implementing and supporting the production of O'Reilly books marked up in DocBook since 1994.
