5. Acknowledgments

5.1. A Bit of History

In 2003, Nat Makarevitch contacted me (Raphaël) because he wanted to publish a book on Debian in the Cahier de l'Admin (Admin's Handbook) collection that he was managing for Eyrolles, a leading French editor of technical books. I immediately accepted to write it. The first edition came out on 14th October 2004 and was a huge success — it was sold out barely four months later.

Since then, we have released 4 other editions of the French book, one for each subsequent Debian release. Roland Mas, who started working on the book as my proofreader, gradually became its co-author.

While we were obviously satisfied with the book's success, we always hoped that Eyrolles would convince an international editor to translate it into English. We had received numerous comments explaining how the book helped people to get started with Debian, and we were keen to have the book benefit more people in the same way.

Alas, no English-speaking editor that we contacted was willing to take the risk of translating and publishing the book. Not put off by this small setback, we decided to negotiate with our French editor Eyrolles to recuperate the necessary rights to translate the book into English and to try to publish it ourselves.

5.2. A Crowd-Funded Translation

Translating a book of 450 pages is a considerable effort that requires several months of work. For self-employed people like Roland and me, we had to ensure a minimum income to mobilize the time necessary to complete the project. So we set up a crowd-funding campaign on Ulule and asked people to pledge money towards the project.

→ http://www.ulule.com/debian-handbook/

The campaign had two goals: raising €15,000 for the translation and completing a €25,000 liberation fund to get the resulting book published under a free license — that is, a license that fully follows the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

When the Ulule campaign ended, the first goal had been achieved with €24,345 raised. The liberation fund was not complete however, with only €14,935 raised. As initially announced, the liberation campaign continued independently from Ulule on the book's official website.

While we were busy translating the book, donations towards the liberation continued to flow in… And in April 2012, the liberation fund was completed. You can thus benefit from this book under the terms of a free license.

We would like to thank everybody who contributed to these fundraising campaigns, either by pledging some money or by passing the word around. We couldn't have done it without you.

5.2.1. Supportive Companies and Organizations

We had the pleasure of getting significant contributions from many free software-friendly companies and organizations. Thank you to Code Lutin, École Ouverte Francophone, Evolix, Fantini Bakery, FSF France, Offensive Security (the company behind BackTrack Linux), Opensides, Proxmox Server Solutions Gmbh, SSIELL (Société Solidaire d'Informatique En Logiciels Libres), and Syminet.

We would also like to thank OMG! Ubuntu and April for their help in promoting the operation.

5.2.2. Individual Supporters

With over 650 supporters in the initial fundraising, and several hundred more in the continued liberation campaign, it is thanks to people like you that this project has been possible. Thank you!

We want to address our special thanks to those who contributed at least €35 (sometimes much more!) to the liberation fund. We are glad that there are so many people who share our values about freedom and yet recognize that we deserved a compensation for the work that we have put into this project.

So thank you Alain Coron, Alain Thabaud, Alan Milnes, Alastair Sherringham, Alban Dumerain, Alessio Spadaro, Alex King, Alexandre Dupas, Ambrose Andrews, Andre Klärner, Andreas Olsson, Andrej Ricnik, Andrew Alderwick, Anselm Lingnau, Antoine Emerit, Armin F. Gnosa, Avétis Kazarian, Bdale Garbee, Benoit Barthelet, Bernard Zijlstra, Carles Guadall Blancafort, Carlos Horowicz — Planisys S.A., Charles Brisset, Charlie Orford, Chris Sykes, Christian Bayle, Christian Leutloff, Christian Maier, Christian Perrier, Christophe Drevet, Christophe Schockaert (R3vLibre), Christopher Allan Webber, Colin Ameigh, Damien Dubédat, Dan Pettersson, Dave Lozier, David Bercot, David James, David Schmitt, David Tran Quang Ty, Elizabeth Young, Fabian Rodriguez, Ferenc Kiraly, Frédéric Perrenot — Intelligence Service 001, Fumihito Yoshida, Gian-Maria Daffré, Gilles Meier, Giorgio Cittadini, Héctor Orón Martínez, Henry, Herbert Kaminski, Hideki Yamane, Hoffmann Information Services GmbH, Holger Burkhardt, Horia Ardelean, Ivo Ugrina, Jan Dittberner, Jim Salter, Johannes Obermüller, Jonas Bofjäll, Jordi Fernandez Moledo, Jorg Willekens, Joshua, Kastrolis Imanta, Keisuke Nakao, Kévin Audebrand, Korbinian Preisler, Kristian Tizzard, Laurent Bruguière, Laurent Hamel, Leurent Sylvain, Loïc Revest, Luca Scarabello, Lukas Bai, Marc Singer, Marcelo Nicolas Manso, Marilyne et Thomas, Mark Janssen — Sig-I/O Automatisering, Mark Sheppard, Mark Symonds, Mathias Bocquet, Matteo Fulgheri, Michael Schaffner, Michele Baldessari, Mike Chaberski, Mike Linksvayer, Minh Ha Duong, Moreau Frédéric, Morphium, Nathael Pajani, Nathan Paul Simons, Nicholas Davidson, Nicola Chiapolini, Ole-Morten, Olivier Mondoloni, Paolo Innocenti, Pascal Cuoq, Patrick Camelin, Per Carlson, Philip Bolting, Philippe Gauthier, Philippe Teuwen, PJ King, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil (j4v4m4n), Ralf Zimmermann, Ray McCarthy, Rich, Rikard Westman, Robert Kosch, Sander Scheepens, Sébastien Picard, Stappers, Stavros Giannouris, Steve-David Marguet, T. Gerigk, Tanguy Ortolo, Thomas Hochstein, Thomas Müller, Thomas Pierson, Tigran Zakoyan, Tobias Gruetzmacher, Tournier Simon, Trans-IP Internet Services, Viktor Ekmark, Vincent Demeester, Vincent van Adrighem, Volker Schlecht, Werner Kuballa, Xavier Neys, and Yazid Cassam Sulliman.

5.3. Special Thanks to Contributors

This book would not be what it is without the contributions of several persons who each played an important role. We would like to thank Marilyne Brun, who helped us to translate the sample chapter and who worked with us to define some common translation rules. She also revised several chapters which were desperately in need of supplementary work. Thank you to Anthony Baldwin (of Baldwin Linguas) who translated several chapters for us.

We benefited from the generous help of proofreaders: Daniel Phillips, Gerold Rupprecht, Gordon Dey, Jacob Owens, and Tom Syroid. They each reviewed many chapters. Thank you very much!

We would also like to thank the readers of the French book who provided us some nice quotes to confirm that the book was really worth being translated: thank you Christian Perrier, David Bercot, Étienne Liétart, and Gilles Roussi. Stefano Zacchiroli — who was Debian Project Leader during the crowdfunding campaign — also deserves a big thank you, he kindly endorsed the project with a quote explaining that free (as in freedom) books were more than needed.

If you have the pleasure to read these lines in a paperback copy of the book, then you should join us to thank Benoît Guillon, Jean-Côme Charpentier, and Sébastien Mengin who worked on the interior book design. Benoît is the upstream author of dblatex — the tool we used to convert DocBook into LaTeX (and then PDF). Sébastien is the designer who created this nice book layout and Jean-Côme is the LaTeX expert who implemented it as a stylesheet usable with dblatex. Thank you guys for all the hard work!

Finally, thank you to Thierry Stempfel for the nice pictures introducing each chapter, and thank you to Doru Patrascu for the beautiful book cover.

5.4. Personal Acknowledgments from Raphaël

First off, I would like to thank Nat Makarevitch, who offered me the possibility to write this book and who provided strong guidance during the year it took to get it done. Thank you also to the fine team at Eyrolles, and Muriel Shan Sei Fan in particular. She has been very patient with me and I learned a lot with her.

The period of the Ulule campaign was very demanding for me but I would like to thank everybody who helped to make it a success, and in particular the Ulule team who reacted very quickly to my many requests. Thank you also to everybody who promoted the operation. I don't have any exhaustive list (and if I had it would probably be too long) but I would like to thank a few people who were in touch with me: Joey-Elijah Sneddon and Benjamin Humphrey of OMG! Ubuntu, Frédéric Couchet of April.org, Jake Edge of Linux Weekly News, Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint, Ladislav Bodnar of Distrowatch, Steve Kemp of Debian-Administration.org, Christian Pfeiffer Jensen of Debian-News.net, Artem Nosulchik of LinuxScrew.com, Stephan Ramoin of Gandi.net, Matthew Bloch of Bytemark.co.uk, the team at Divergence FM, Rikki Kite of Linux New Media, Jono Bacon, the marketing team at Eyrolles, and numerous others that I have forgotten (sorry about that).

I would like to address a special thanks to Roland Mas, my co-author. We have been collaborating on this book since the start and he has always been up to the challenge. And I must say that completing the Debian Administrator's Handbook has been a lot of work…

Last but not least, thank you to my wife, Sophie. She has been very supportive of my work on this book and on Debian in general. There have been too many days (and nights) when I left her alone with our 2-year-old son to make some progress on the book. I am grateful for her support and know how lucky I am to have her.

5.5. Personal Acknowledgments from Roland

Well, Raphaël preempted most of my “external” thank-yous already. I am still going to emphasize my personal gratitude to the good folks at Eyrolles, with whom collaboration has always been pleasant and smooth. Hopefully the results of their excellent advice hasn't been lost in translation.

I am extremely grateful to Raphaël for taking on the administrative part of this English edition. From organizing the funding campaign to the last details of the book layout, producing a translated book is so much more than just translating and proofreading, and Raphaël did (or delegated and supervised) it all. So thanks.

Thanks also to all who more or less directly contributed to this book, by providing clarifications or explanations, or translating advice. They are too many to mention, but most of them can usually be found on various #debian-* IRC channels.

There is of course some overlap with the previous set of people, but specific thanks are still in order for the people who actually do Debian. There wouldn't be much of a book without them, and I am still amazed at what the Debian project as a whole produces and makes available to any and all.

More personal thanks go to my friends and my clients, for their understanding when I was less responsive because I was working on this book, and also for their constant support, encouragement and egging on. You know who you are; thanks.

And finally; I am sure they would be surprised by being mentioned here, but I would like to extend my gratitude to Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Tom Holt, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and of course the late Douglas Adams. The countless hours I spent enjoying their books are directly responsible for my being able to take part in translating this one.