On ePub/PDF versions of my posts and licensing

I’ve been asked several times about this, so I wanted to make an “official” statement:

No, I will not prepare ePub/PDF (“book”) versions of posts, particularly the “A trip through the Graphics Pipeline 2011” and “Optimizing Software Occlusion Culling” series. However, should someone be willing to prepare such a thing, I’d be very happy to provide them with a WordPress extended RSS dump of the site contents (with your comments and all other emails / personal data removed, don’t worry) and host the results. If you’re interested in helping, please write a comment with a valid email address and I’ll get in touch with you.

To clarify the legal situation, I have put both these series into the public domain (using the CC-0 “license” waiver). This means you may do with these posts whatever you want. You may edit them, update them or add additional information; you may turn them into an eBook, PDF, or hardcopy book; you may use it as a starting point for a graphics pipeline Wiki, if you are so inclined – I don’t have the energy or web development chops to set that kind of thing up, but I’d be happy to contribute to it if it existed! You may also claim that you wrote them yourself, sell it to a publisher for a million bucks, and invest the proceeds in land mines you bury in a public park. I would rather that you not do these things, but it boils down to this: if you were to do it, would I want to make the whole affair even more unpleasant for myself than it would already be by engaging in complicated and expensive legal proceedings? And my answer to that question is a clear “no”.

In fact, my reasons for not preparing eBook versions and for releasing the texts in the public domain are basically the same: I enjoy writing these posts, and I enjoy seeing people read them. I do not enjoy wrestling with publication formats or blogging frameworks, and I certainly don’t enjoy dealing with legal issues. The reason I can manage to write a few thousand words of technical content a week despite having a full-time job is because I’ve structured the experience to be as enjoyable and low-friction for me as possible. Last year, I tried editing the “A trip through the Graphics Pipeline 2011” series into a book format, and progress was excruciatingly slow, because ultimately it was not a fun task for me; it felt like an unpaid part-time job, so at some point I just stopped.

So this is the deal: I’m a professional software developer that happens to like writing. But the writing is a pure “bonus”; I do it because I enjoy it, but only as long as it’s on my terms – I write what I feel like writing, on whatever schedule pleases me, and without any additional process beyond hitting “Publish” once I’m done. I’ll be happy to help anyone who wants to do more than that, but I’m not going to do it myself.