Marco, I disagree very strongly with your philosophy. Open source software needs as much advertisement and sponsorship from outside the the developer community. A technology will gain acceptance if it is documented and placed within easy access of as big a community outside the immediate developer community. Often times the developers are too busy creating the system which means user documentation are done at a later time. Most book projects are started during a period when there is interest in the project and the documentation is not yet ready.
In addition to the documentation, it helps to have tutorials and regular textbooks that make it easy for those who are outside the circle of developers/contributors/testers to come up to speed and adopt the new technology. There are not many publishers who would get involved in the opensource movement if there were no financial rewards in it for them. If there was that restriction, opensource projects would be the worlds best kept secret!! It is also true that the authors do not become rich writing the book(s), so in a way they are contributing to the success of the project too. I am quite sure there are publishers who in turn make contributions to the ASF in order to sponsor the movement. Anybody have information on which publishers sponsor or contribute to the ASF? My opinions aside ... could any of the developers on the list clarify Marco's comments below? "Have you received the assent from ASF or people as Stefano Mazzocchi?" If so is there a formal process to get this assent? You don't have to be a member of the developer community to create documentation on any of the open source projects. Writing a book on it is a form of documentation and spreading the word. It is not speculation ... just a form of marketing!! A well formatted and presented book from a well know publisher goes a long way in selling the concept and product which no HTML or PDF user docs or faqs can achieve. I too am involved with a group writing a book on Cocoon2 programming which is due out in October. Some initial details are at http://www.netswirl.com/publications.htm A full web description will be available on the Sybex web site soon. Conrad D'Cruz marco spinetti wrote: > One question: is the profit for the apache software foundation (ASF)? > > If not, in my opinion it's against the open source apache philosophy. > > Cocoon is borned as open source project and then all is free. > > Are you a member of people that created Cocoon? > Have you received the assent from ASF or people as Stefano Mazzocchi? > > If yes all is ok, otherwise in my opinion you are speculating on Cocoon. > > Marco > > +---------------------------------------------------------------+ > Software engineer Spinetti Marco > Italy > +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
