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ng said, we could always take the carrot-and-stick approach. The carrot would be the publicity that came with publishing an e-book that honored the hacker community's internal ethics. The stick would be the risks associated with publishing an e-book that didn't. Nine months before Dmitri Skylarov became an Internet cause celebre, we knew it was only a matter of time before an enterprising programmer revealed how to hack e-books. We also knew that a major publishing house releasing an encryption-protected e-book on Richard M. Stallman was the software equivalent of putting "Steal This E-Book" on the cover.
After my meeting with Henning, I put a call into Stallman. Hoping to make the carrot more enticing, I discussed a number of potential compromises. What if the publisher released the book's content under a split license, something similar to what Sun Microsystems had done with Open Office, the free software desktop applications suite? The publisher could then release commercial versions of the e-book under a normal format, taking advantage of all the bells and whistles that went with the e-book software, while releasing the copyable version under a less aesthetically pleasing HTML format.
Stallman told me he didn't mind the split-license idea, but he did dislike the idea of making the freely copyable version inferior to the restricted version. Besides, he said, the idea was too cumbersome. Split licenses worked in the case of Sun's Open Office only because he had no control over the decision making. In this case, Stallman said, he did have a way to control the outcome. He could refuse to cooperate.
I made a few more suggestions with little effect. About the only thing I could get out of Stallman was a concession that the e-book's copyright restrict all forms of file sharing to "noncommercial redistribution."
Before I signed off, Stallman suggested I tell the publisher that I'd promised Stallman that the work would be free. I told Stallman I couldn't agree to that statement but that I d
