I am the Mara. Bhante Sujato escape from my net for the time being. I am back to my drawing board. Ha.Ha
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@Viveka Hi Moderator please kindly remove my posts in this thread or create a new thread so we can discuss how materials can be misused by when it placed in the wrong hand.
Thank you.
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I have heard people argue from the basis of fear and control so many times, and I think it is just misguided. You can’t base a spiritual journey on fear.
So far, I have released everything I have done with no caveats, and what have we seen?
- Printed editions made by friends!
- A professional printed edition of the Theragatha!
- Cool voice app!
- Nice EPUBs!
- Soon, podcasts!
Creativity and innovation is what we need, let us go forth and do awesome things! Remix and reinvent! Do it again, do it better! Do things that I can’t even dream of!
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What is this Bhante?
Do you mean some friends already printed your translation of four Nikaya?
That’s right. well, excerpts anyway.
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Translation work is a very serious job when it comes to Buddhist teaching of Anatta. I just found a classic problem of it just now.
R.Davids has done a serious mistake in his translation in the last few sentences.
He translated ‘Yes, it would, Sir.’ instead of ‘Yes, it would not, Sir.’
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I think it’s great. It’s in the spirit of what Knuth and Lamport did with TeX and LaTeX, and Stallman did with the GNU project, which enabled the creation of GNU/Linux, which is what most supercomputers run these days…
In those cases the authors had some restrictions. Knuth specified that any variant had to have a different name, and the GNU licences are designed to force the release of source code of derivatives. But in neither case was there any prohibition of making money - RedHat makes a lot of money providing a well-supported Linux distribution, for example.
It’s the same with most scientific research. We are pleased when people take our work and improve on it - that’s the game! It’s expected that we’ll be referenced - but there’s no legal requirement.
Certain discoveries with commercial potential get patented, of course, but that’s a small part of the total output.
Unlike the examples of TeX/LaTeX/GNU/Linux, Bhante’s public domain work doesn’t need elaborate protection. Someone might take it and make money by printing or some other type of distribution (with or without modification), but that wouldn’t restrict its use. In fact, the ability to pay for a nice printed copy via Lulu is, in my view, a better method than the restrictive “free distribution only” approach, which only reaches people with the right connections.
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Ajahn, isn’t there any free-distribution Buddhist publishers anywhere who have been asked if they want to produce a run of hard copies?
I picked up a lot of Dhamma books like this in the past? Why would this create an obstacle to S.C.'s publishing strategy?
How about rice-paper scrolls printed in Taiwan? You’ve got Taiwanese Mitra’s - is that correct? I wonder if they have this kind of digital typeset with some Dhamma-doodles for good measure (see below).
How about: the first letters like this:
Laurence, thank you for volunteering to make this happen!
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There are, and we will work in the long term with budaedu of taiwan. But i am not rushing this, I want to make sure the text settles down, there are thousands more corrections and additions coming soon. Small stuff, but it all adds up. Maybe towards the end of this year we’ll look at creating official printed editions.
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If you are replying to my post, I didn’t mean that free-distribution books, from ForestSangha, etc, are a bad thing. I meant that if one does not have connections with particular monasteries, it is not always easy to get hold of hard copies.
Whereas an arrangement with a service like Lulu to print and mail is much easier get hold of:
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Waiting until the texts are more settled (your avoidance of the word ‘finalised’ is nice) is very sagacious Sadhu.
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Patient endurance is the highest austerity - thanks for showing us how to wait with open-ended patience. A bunch of nobody’s going nowhere! Xxoo
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I wasn’t responding to your post. I was asking ‘Ajahn Sujato’ a question and, making an observation, based on past experience.
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Thank you Bhante.
Now I see your insight.
You have free up the Buddha’s teaching to the English Speaking world!
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That’s the plan. Only, not just the English-speaking world!
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Lots of errors in the Sinhala translation hosted on SC. 
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