In 2003, Nat Makarévitch contacted 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. Raphaël 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 5 other editions of the French book, one for each subsequent Debian release. Roland, who started working on the book as a 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 negotiated with our French editor Eyrolles and got back the necessary rights to translate the book into English and publish it ourselves. Thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, we worked on the translation between December 2011 and May 2012. The “Debian Administrator's Handbook” was born and it was published under a free-software license!

While this was an important milestone, we already knew that the story would be not be over for us until we could contribute the French book as an official translation of the English book. This was not possible at that time because the French book was still distributed commercially under a non-free license by Eyrolles.

In 2013, the release of Debian 7 gave us a good opportunity to discuss a new contract with Eyrolles. We convinced them that a license more in line with the Debian values would contribute to the book's success. That wasn't an easy deal to make, and we agreed to setup another crowdfunding campaign to cover some of the costs and reduce the risks involved. The operation was again a huge success and in July 2013, we added a French translation to the Debian Administrator's Handbook.

We are back in 2011 and we just got the required rights to make an English translation of our French book. We are looking into ways to make this happen.

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

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.

After the publication of the English book under a free software licence, we were in a weird situation with a free book which is a translation of a non-free book (since it was still distributed commercially under a non-free license by Eyrolles).

We knew that fixing this would require to convince Eyrolles that a free license would contribute to the book's success. The opportunity came to us in 2013 when we had to discuss a new contract to update the book for Debian 7. Since freeing a book often has a significant impact on its sales, as a compromise, we agreed to setup a crowdfunding campaign to offset some of the risks involved and to contribute to the publication costs of a new edition. The campaign was again hosted on Ulule:

The target was at €15,000 in 30 days. It took us less than a week to reach it, and at the end we got a whopping €25,518 from 721 supporters.

We had significant contributions from free software-friendly companies and organizations. Let us thank the LinuxFr.org website, Korben, Addventure, Eco-Cystèmes, ELOL SARL, and Linuvers. Many thanks to LinuxFr and Korben, they considerably helped to spread the news.

The operation has been a huge success because hundreds of people share our values of freedom and put their money to back it up! Thank you for this.

Special thanks to those who opted to give 25€ more than the value of their reward. Your faith in this project is highly appreciated. Thank you Adrien Guionie, Adrien Ollier, Adrien Roger, Agileo Automation, Alban Duval, Alex Viala, Alexandre Dupas, Alexandre Roman, Alexis Bienvenüe, Anthony Renoux, Aurélien Beaujean, Baptiste Darthenay, Basile Deplante, Benjamin Cama, Benjamin Guillaume, Benoit Duchene, Benoît Sibaud, Bornet, Brett Ellis, Brice Sevat, Bruno Le Goff, Bruno Marmier, Cédric Briner, Cédric Charlet, Cédrik Bernard, Celia Redondo, Cengiz Ünlü, Charles Flèche, Christian Bayle, Christophe Antoine, Christophe Bliard, Christophe Carré, Christophe De Saint Leger, Christophe Perrot, Christophe Robert, Christophe Schockaert, Damien Escoffier, David Dellier, David Trolle, Davy Hubert, Decio Valeri, Denis Marcq, Denis Soriano, Didier Hénaux, Dirk Linnerkamp, Edouard Postel, Eric Coquard, Eric Lemesre, Eric Parthuisot, Eric Vernichon, Érik Le Blanc, Fabian Culot, Fabien Givors, Florent Bories, Florent Machen, Florestan Fournier, Florian Dumas, François Ducrocq, Francois Lepoittevin, François-Régis Vuillemin, Frédéric Boiteux, Frédéric Guélen, Frédéric Keigler, Frédéric Lietart, Gabriel Moreau, Gian-Maria Daffré, Grégory Lèche, Grégory Valentin, Guillaume Boulaton, Guillaume Chevillot, Guillaume Delvit, Guillaume Michon, Hervé Guimbretiere, Iván Alemán, Jacques Bompas, Jannine Koch, Jean-Baptiste Roulier, Jean-Christophe Becquet, Jean-François Bilger, Jean-Michel Grare, Jean-Sébastien Lebacq, Jérôme Ballot, Jerome Pellois, Johan Roussel, Jonathan Gallon, Joris Dedieu, Julien Gilles, Julien Groselle, Kevin Messer, Laurent Espitallier, Laurent Fuentes, Le Goût Du Libre, Ludovic Poux, Marc Gasnot, Marc Verprat, Marc-Henri Primault, Martin Bourdoiseau, Mathieu Chapounet, Mathieu Emering, Matthieu Joly, Melvyn Leroy, Michel Casabona, Michel Kapel, Mickael Tonneau, Mikaël Marcaud, Nicolas Bertaina, Nicolas Bonnet, Nicolas Dandrimont, Nicolas Dick, Nicolas Hicher, Nicolas Karolak, Nicolas Schont, Olivier Gosset, Olivier Langella, Patrick Francelle, Patrick Nomblot, Philippe Gaillard, Philippe Le Naour, Philippe Martin, Philippe Moniez, Philippe Teuwen, Pierre Brun, Pierre Gambarotto, Pierre-Dominique Perrier, Quentin Fait, Raphaël Enrici — Root 42, Rémi Vanicat, Rhydwen Volsik, RyXéo SARL, Samuel Boulier, Sandrine D'hooge, Sébasiten Piguet, Sébastien Bollingh, Sébastien Kalt, Sébastien Lardière, Sébastien Poher, Sébastien Prosper, Sébastien Raison, Simon Folco, Société Téïcée, Stéphane Leibovitsch, Stéphane Paillet, Steve-David Marguet, Sylvain Desveaux, Tamatoa Davio, Thibault Taillandier, Thibaut Girka, Thibaut Poullain, Thierry Jaouen, Thomas Etcheverria, Thomas Vidal, Thomas Vincent, Vincent Avez, Vincent Merlet, Xavier Alt, Xavier Bensemhoun, Xavier Devlamynck, Xavier Guillot, Xavier Jacquelin, Xavier Neys, Yannick Britis, Yannick Guérin, and Yves Martin.

This book would not be what it is without the contributions of several persons who each played an important role during the translation phase and beyond. 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!

Then, once the English version was liberated, of course we got plenty of feedback and suggestions and fixes from the readers, and even more from the many teams who undertook to translate this book into other languages. Thanks!

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.

First off, I would like to thank Nat Makarévitch, 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 campaigns were very demanding for me but I would like to thank everybody who helped to make them a success, and in particular the Ulule team who reacted very quickly to my many requests. Thank you also to everybody who promoted the operations. 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, Florent Zara of LinuxFr.org, Manu of Korben.info, 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 sons to make some progress on the book. I am grateful for her support and know how lucky I am to have her.

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 one first and writing new parts later.