I've been toying with the same idea myself: writing user documentation for
jBoss and selling it on a pay-per-download basis. And I've come to the
conclusion that it's not profitable.
Although you've seen me contribute to jBoss in the past, you may not
recognize my name. I set up Mind's Eye Fiction, <http://tale.com/>, the
Web's first and longest surviving pay-per-view Web publisher. I sold out to
a competitor at the height of the .com craze, but I know pay-per-view
inside and out. Right now, I'm building e-book selling tools in
EJB/servlets. (That's one reason I'm here.)
I can tell you that there isn't much revenue to be found in this revenue
stream. You need thousands of paying customers to support a dozen or so
authors, and jBoss documentation won't have thousands of paying customers.
It may have a few hundred. Ever.
There are good reasons why most other Open Source projects do not sell
their official documentation in a pay-per-view system, including the fact
that charging for the official documentation will decrease the popularity
of the the whole project. The fact that the official documentation for most
Open Source projects is pretty pitiful should make it clear that it's
usually not profitable to do this.
It would be profitable to publish documentation for jBoss if the user base
is large enough. (Like Redhat. And Apache could do this, but they don't.)
But the user base will probably remain small with poor docs or if you
charge for docs. And the same programmers who are great at writing
high-tech code rarely have the discipline, skill or patience to write
high-quality docs. This is a Catch-22 inherent in Open Source.
If jBoss's user base grows large enough, and if jBoss is distinct enough
from other EJB containers to warrant it, you might be able to convince a
publishing company to publish a jBoss textbook, and you could earn a few
thousand dollars. But what you're suggesting (selling jBoss docs on-line)
involves setting up your own pay-per-view publishing company and making a
profit from selling e-books. I can tell you from personal experience that
it can be done -- I built and ran the world's only profitable e-book
publishing company. But that's a much harder job, with much lower rewards,
than you guys really want to take on.
Programmers have a love/hate relationship with docs. They love to have
them, but they hate to write them. They love good docs, but they hate bad
or mediocre docs. They love getting them, but they really hate paying for them.
Professional software must include professional docs, but the sponsoring
organization must invest in those docs, and amortize that investment from
its other revenue streams. Revenue streams from software include (but are
not limited to) charging for the software (impossible here), charging for
the docs (IMO not feasible here), charging for support/consulting, charging
for advertisements, charging for a formal compliance certification
processes (a distinct possibility here), and charging for automated
update/notification services (like Redhat's
<http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/programs.html>).
If you guys want to earn a few thousand from writing a textbook, and if you
have the numbers that will convince a computer book publisher that there's
a market for such a book, I have contacts in the book publishing industry
and a bit of writing experience, and I'd be willing to take on this
project. But that's a printed book, not a downloadable e-book. Most e-books
are not profitable. (Yet.)
So don't waste your time on this, folks. Find another revenue stream.
-- Ken Jenks, http://abiblion.com/
Tools for reading.
