I'm glad that somebody has already asked how he could contribute to the collaborative version of Open Life. We came to the conclusion that the collaborative edition will be a completely new book, written in collaboration by all of us who want to be a part of it. The new book will be called "Open Life 2.0" as a working title. The "old book" will be referred to as "Open Life 1.0"

In the second part of this "The making of..." series, I will tell a little about setting up www.openlife.cc with Drupal.

The domain name

Already when I was publishing the Finnish book I prepared for an eventual translation and had in mind the name "Open Life". Unfortunately, domain names like openlife.org, openlife.info and openlife.net were already registered then, although none of those had functioning websites. I believe openlife.com might had been free, but even so, a .com name didn't feel appropriate. So instead of paying hundreds of dollars to transfer those to me, I did a trick I've used earlier too, I added a dash and registered open-life.org instead.

If you've had a look at the fine print you'll already know, the book cover was made using Creative Commons licensed images from the Internet. It is in itself supposed to be a testimony of how you can publish books and other things as part of an Open Source continuum. I wanted to make a nice cover image and I wanted to find and use only images licensed under suitably licensed pictures. Even if I could have used some clipart too, in this case I did not want to do that out of pure principle. I wanted everything in the book to be Open Source.

Here is my own talk from the Vaasa seminar. Some of this was actually not spoken out loud, in two places I skipped a little to fit into my given timeslot.

I posted a summary of the rest of the seminar separately.

I'm back home, after flying around Europe last week and ending up in Vaasa on Friday to attend the Open Source seminar arranged by the Vaasa Applied Sciences University and their EU funded Business in Open Source program.

When rock stars publish a new record, they go on a tour and have concerts around the world. Publishing a book is kind of the same. You get invited to talk in various Open Source events. This Friday (October 6th) I'll be in Vaasa for the EU sponsored Business In Open Source seminar.

Last Friday night I headed to the sauna lounge at Botta, in Helsinki center. Director of the Scifi parody Starwreck Timo Vuorensola had been invited jointly by Finnish Linux Users Group, Finnish Unix Users Group and the Helsinki University Computer Science student body.

I noticed yesterday that Open Life has now showed up also at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and presumable available at every other book store in the world as well. So now it's really published!