I think technical books are a bit different than a lot of other books. They generally have a smaller audience and are most valid for a year or two. These and

I think technical books are a bit different than a lot of other books. They generally have a smaller audience and are most valid for a year or two. These and text books (for core subjects) have always been around $50-$100. More niche books or reference books are many times more. Since the audience is small and most of the benefit is early on, I think there's a lot of value in publicly releasing it later. Much like id Software tends to open source their engines about 5 years after release even though they would license and sell it for many thousands of dollars. About your javascript example. A lot of companies are just very tight with money. I doubt most places I worked would use version control if it wasn't free. Years would go by when we needed to update something like MySQL on a server, but nobody had the time. I'd ask, "Can't we just get a contractor to carry it out? We're all busy and it doesn't make sense to hire someone full time." but that fell on deaf ears. I imagine part of it as mindlessly sticking to a system that has worked for them (only having full time workers and doing everything in house) and part of it is getting burned by wasting money on unused services. I've often seen, "We're paying 10k a year for that? I can install/port an open source version and spend probably 10 hours a year maintaining it" Personally, I've pushed to open source anything that's not a competitive advantage. I see everyone wasting too much time doing the same thing at multiple companies that just take time away from what we like/want doing and what makes us money.