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!
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).
> 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.
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.