My colleague Jim Minatel, over on his The Average Joe: A Book Publisher Blog, shares that Wiley is looking for an Acquisitions Editor for Open Source Topics. Acquisitions editors are the folk that pay attention to the particular market segment, identify the thought leaders, and communicate with them about the possibility of them writing books for the publisher (Jim Minatel has a must-read piece about The Role of the Acquisitions Editor too).

But while being an AE in just about any market space is nothing unusual - there are lots of them, from health to romance, sports to construction, working for hundreds of different publishers - but there’s something a bit different about the Open Source community, and that’s the long-running undercurrent of information wants to be free.

As a relatively prolific business and technology writer (My new Growing Your Business with Google book marks 19 published books for me, with #20 in the production pipeline), I really don’t agree with the whole information wants to be free mantra, and as far back as…