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I think you may have missed this part: >The problem with these manuals was not that O'Reilly Associates charged a price for printed copies—that in itself is fi

• Uehreka 6y ago
  If you’re saying people need to make their content available for free with an option to pay for a printed copy, then you’re telling them they can’t make money from their work, which is the thing at issue. And we can argue about whether authors of books about FOSS tools should embrace the same ethos as those tools’ developers, but it seems silly to hide the ball or act like there’s a win-win solution hiding in plain sight.
  • lelandbatey 6y ago
    I think what's being pointed out is more just a problem, no concrete solution (like "make their content available for free with an option to pay for a printed copy") is being prescribed. But if we are talking about prescriptive solutions, what I'd want that does all this is a pay-to-access documentation Wiki, where I and other users of the software can make changes (or at least propose changes) to those docs that we read and rely on.
  • cycloptic 6y ago
    I'm not saying that and the article doesn't say that either. If anything it says the opposite, but the real focus of is asking for documentation writers to publish their source files. (odt/doc files, latex/rst/md sources, etc...) My personal opinion is that open source projects should probably do this, when a project is taking patches to the source and contributors can't also contribute to the docs then the docs will lag behind.