Fluent Bit Articles on TheNewStack – a Biproduct of a book sponsor?

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author, book, books, Fluent Bit, manning, reading, The New Stack, TNS, writing

Like many developers and architects, I track the news feeds from websites such as The New Stack and InfoQ. I’ve even submitted articles to some of these sites and saw them published. However, in the last week, something rather odd occurred: articles in The New Stack (TNS) appeared, attributed to me, although I had no involvement in the publication process with TNS; yet, the content is definitely mine. So what appears to be happening?

To help answer this, let me provide a little backstory. Back in October and November last year, we completed the publication of my book about Fluent Bit (called Logs and Telemetry with a working title of Fluent Bit with Kubernetes), a follow-up from Logging In Action (which covered Fluent Bit’s older sibling, Fluentd). During the process of writing these books, I have had the opportunity to get to know members of the team behind these CNCF projects and consider them as engineering friends. Through several changes, the core team has primarily come to work for Chronosphere. To cut a long story short, I connected the Fluent Bit team to Manning, and they sponsored my book (giving them the privilege of giving away a certain number of copies of the book, cover branding, and so on).

It appears that, as part of working with Manning’s marketing team, authors are invited to submit articles and agree to have them published on Manning’s website. Upon closer examination, the articles appear to have been sponsored by Chronosphere, with an apparent reference to Manning publications. So somewhere among the marketing and sales teams, an agreement has been made, and content has been reused. Sadly, no one thought to tell the author.

I don’t in principle have an issue with this, after all, I wrote the book, and blog on these subjects because I believe enabling an understanding of technologies like Fluent Bit is valuable and my way of contributing to the IT community (Yes, I do see a little bit of money from sales, but the money-to-time and effort ratio works out to be less than minimum wage).

The most frustrating bit of all of this is that one of the articles links to a book I’ve not been involved with, and the authors of Effective Platform Engineering aren’t being properly credited. It turns out that Chronosphere is sponsoring Effective Platform Engineering (Manning’s page for this is here).