My thoughts summed up by others

["David C. Mason" <dcm redhat com>]

As usual, my email skills were lacking. I think Tim has nailed what is
rattling around in my head. If I can just pull some quotes from a
couple of his messages...


>The MacMillan publishing model relies heavily
>on "frontlist" sales to the stores, rather than continuing sales
>over time.  They are continually pushing new product out at
>stores, and abandoning most of what they published earlier, in
>quest of greener pastures.  Most of those books that they have up
>for free download are actually no longer available in bookstores,
>even though they are "current."
>
>I also wouldn't assume that their profits are healthy.  Macmillan
>has historically been quite profitable, but they've fallen on
>hard times lately.

Having been a minor "student" of the publishing industry I have seen
this echoed quite a bit recently. As I said before, the specialty
technical book is not a big seller. Even though it is an ego deflater,
GNOME books, Linux books, and development books are specialties.


>I completely agree with RMS and with Miguel that it's important
>for free software to have good free documentation as well.  I
>just don't think that this means that all books about free
>software should also be free.


Again, this is a great statement. Books and software are two
completely different beasts. Open source software works because of
what software is and how we use it. We benefit from being able to
change software to answer a need or fix a problem. It is much more
difficult to change someone's writing. It kills the voice of the
content and no one benefits. 

Carrying the model further, if one of the thrusts of this idea is to
benefit the author, the business model of the open source community
would not benefit any author. If a book is truly open source then
anyone could pick it up and publish it. Does that mean the author gets
no royalties from that second publication? If so, that means that the
second publisher has lower overhead so charges less for the book? Then
the original publisher sells less books because they charge more than
the other guy and, in turn, the author makes less cash. <headspin>

Again I have to state that, although this debate is wonderful and well
worth the effort, I would love to see as much talk and effort put into
the documentation we NEED that IS free and part of the GNOME
project (and other projects for that matter). Lets continue this talk
while we all write one or two pages of reference and tutorials.

Maybe even Tim can join in and do some reference docs for us. How
about it?


Dave
-- 

          David Mason
        Red Hat AD Labs

        dcm@redhat.com