Ed wrote:
The long awaited book would be a great thing to have.... If there is one
From my (uninformed) perspective, here's what I see as the primary obstacle
to the book.
Books (good ones, at least) are expensive to create. Someone has to write the thing,
and that person has to be pretty experienced. It takes quite some time to write, and that
person has to make a living. In a community the size of OSG's, I'm not sure the profits
from publishing such a book could cover those costs. It would certainly be difficult to
convince a major publisher (even an Oreilly) that it would fly.
Authors I know personally don't usually make a great deal of profit from books.
Self-publishing can cut costs and increase profits, but it makes for a much greater risk.
I expect that neither Robert nor Don can afford to write this book, and I'm not sure
who else could afford to either.
Let's face it, documentation is the Achilles heal of most open source projects. It's
not sexy and fun to work on, and it's difficult to make a business case for it. Robert and
Don probably need to keep going on coding and training and couldn't take the time out
needed to do this.
Perhaps to get the book written, some sort of new revenue model is required? Maybe a
table of contents could be drawn up, and people could pre-order and pre-pay for the book.
Once a sales target was hit, the work would commence.
This reduces the risk to the book creators to where it might be feasible. Instead, the
risk is diluted amongst all of the book purchasers, who are trusting that it will get
done, on time, and be of a quality they expect. I doubt a mainstream publisher would go
for this project, given the low volume involved, but I've seen some programming projects
done on this "bounty" method.
I for one would like to see the book happen, but it's not my biggest wish, so I'm just
tossing some ideas out.
--
Chris 'Xenon' Hanson aka Eric Hammil | http://www.3DNature.com/ eric at logrus
"I set the wheels in motion, turn up all the machines, activate the programs,
and run behind the scenes. I set the clouds in motion, turn up light and
sound,
activate the window, and watch the world go 'round." -Prime Mover, Rush.
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