Just some stray thoughts about writing open source code, books, and tutorials...
Writing code for free has zero financial benefit, of course, and the financial benefit of writing books has (so far) been negligible as well. But producing a useful, viable software project, and documentation for it, has tremendous self-promotion benefits for the authors, who get lots of clients and business. For example, Bob and I (and Robert too, last time I checked) are currently swamped/overwhelmed with work. Then the question looms its ugly head: Write more free code and documentation? Or write code for clients to bring in revenue? I recall Robert expressing the desire to have documentation development pay for itself; that's not really practical, I don't think it ever will in terms of $$$ per hour spent writing. So, the temptation is to quit writing and focus on more direct-revenue-generating tasks. So when people suggest that Robert or Bob and I develop some new whiz-bang feature or documentation, you might understand why our response is "you're part of the community, do it yourself. We're kind of busy with paying projects at the moment." (Tangent: Bob and I are trying to keep a balance and find creative ways to leverage other work for documentation development. For example, we hope the OSG Programming Guide will fall out of our training course curriculum. And much of our work will lead us to improving the comments in the OSG source, which will produce better Reference Manuals.) I think this applies not just to core OSG sw dev and doc dev, but also to other forms of docs: tutorials and examples. Take Joe Sullivan, for example. Based on the reputation he's earned from OSG tutorial development, I imagine he could quit his day job and start picking up clients for OSG dev work in fairly short order. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of such work as far as I can tell. I say this to hopefully inspire people to step up and contribute, earn a name for themselves, and then use that to the advantage of their career (while simultaneously improving OSG or its documentation). If self-employment is a goal, this is one way to get there. Paul Martz Skew Matrix Software LLC http://www.skew-matrix.com 303 859 9466 _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
