3 ms·
AFAIU, the sale of printed manuals was one of the earliest income streams in the Free Software/open source community, and for GNU/FSF in particular. O'Reilly an
by wahern 4y ago
AFAIU, the sale of printed manuals was one of the earliest income streams in the Free Software/open source community, and for GNU/FSF in particular. O'Reilly and maybe some of its contributing authors (some of whom were project maintainers or contributors) made appreciable money selling printed documentation. But calling any of those examples a "business model" for open source development is a stretch.
The sale of support, OTOH, absolutely was an early business model. See, e.g., Cygnus Solutions, Red Hat, etc. And today many project maintainers make money in a similar manner, through contracts or outright full-time employment related to feature development and integration. But this happens just as often in BSD land as Linux land.
- Gualdrapo 4y agoThen I'm failing to understand why not selling texinfo printed manuals is what allegedly makes OpenBSD documentation 'better'.
- wahern 4y agoI think the insinuation is that the electronic documentation distributed with GNU- and Linux-related software was (and remains) subpar because of some early incentive to sell printed manuals, which would be more comprehensive and easier to use; whereas OpenBSD was never financially motivated to cripple their electronic documentation.