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FSF offers $20k for Gnome documentation
Booker sent us a message
from [RMS] found on the Gnome mailing list where he
says "The FSF would gladly pay someone $20k for the rights to
a well-written and comprehensive GNOME programming manual.
We would then publish as free documentation--free as in
freedom, of course. We would sell copies in bookstores, just
as these companies do, just as we do for our existing
manuals."
I'm sure I will regret posting this, but...
Before accepting a contract to write this book, I suggest contacting other people who have been paid to write documentation for the FSF in order to determine what they thought of their experience. Due to privacy concerns, I cannot go into detail, but I know of at least one person who was very unsatisfied with his experience. (hehe, not me!)
You should at a minimum make sure there are very well defined criteria for determining when a particular piece of the book is of acceptable quality. I hear that RMS can be extremely nitpicky about documention, requiring many, many revisions before he is satisfied. This can be frustrating and time consuming for everyone involved.
The FSF makes no secret of the fact that it uses donations to pay people to work on free software. Normally they pay programmers, but they also hire people to work on documentation. What do you think they did with the money?
Posted by tha_skunk:
/.! :-) ).
Yeah I know it's sorta long and, but I really think this is even more interesting for
It's a mail on the gnome mailing list about
Free Documentation ( free as Free Software not beer
Here's the link so check it out. It's really worth it.
click it
Free Documentation anyone?????
If a community gets together and builds a cable company, does that infringe on the rights of other cable companies? If the community starts from scratch, and, using their own money, buys a satellite dish, runs cable to every home in that community, and everyone gets 125 channels, does that constitute dumping? (I'm assuming they all adhere to the appropriate laws WRT subscription programming.)
Here's my understanding:
Mr. Stallman is *not* trying to keep people from earning money from intellectual property. This is a common misconception, especially among people who see the world as a circulatory system for money. He has often stressed that people can make money from their ideas; they just shouldn't do it in an immoral way.
What he (and I, as far as that goes) does *not* like is the hoarding of information, especially when there is no net good that comes from that hoarding.
Large corporations hoard money and resources. As a people, we cannot get those resources from them. Large companies hoarde information. We *can* re-create that information, or even better that information. That is what we are doing. In this way, we wrest a small but substantial chunk of power and put it back in the hands of individuals.
The world is changing. We no longer base our lives on industrialism. The means of production have been transferred from the elite to the collective. And we, the collective, are exsercising that power. As the means of production is popularized, the idea of central publishing becomes less relevent. If *I* am the producer of the information, shouldn't I see the benefits directly, by making it available directly? And if we cut out the middle-man (the publishers), aren't we simply making the information more directly available?
This is not "dumping." I think there has to be some sort of economic leverage to be considered dumping. Instead, it is a populist movement against the entrenched and outdated companies that have a stranglehold on production and distribution.
You're right, though, Mr. Glass. Selling telephones is not like the Free Software movement. Rather, free software is more like public access cable, where anyone can contribute, and where anyone can be heard.
I can see that you'd be terrified, as a journalist. Your job may be outdated in just a few years. Well, welcome to the real world, where everyone has an opinion, and we all get to share them equally; and we are all terrified we may be outdated in just a few years.
I'd like to think I'm agile enough, and have enough foresight, to survive.
But I could be wrong.
- Tony
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
A long time ago, I worked in a retail electronics store. At the time, we'd just started selling telephones in competition with the phone company. One day, a woman came to my counter in the store and told me that I was taking food out of her children's mouths by selling those phones, because her husband worked for the phone company! She thought I should really be ashamed of myself.
I didn't argue, she just seemed too silly. She never considered that I had just as much right to compete with her husband's business as her husband had to compete with mine.
I have already written a GPL'ed chapter and have had it published. The book made #12 on Amazon's list. I only made $1500 from that chapter, but I got invited to speak in Iceland as a result of the chapter (the conference paid for the trip and a week's tourism) and a number of other fun things have happened. I was compensated fairly.
If you can't stand the competition, too darn bad. We're not going away.
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Why 20K? Because they are absolutely sure that people will donate that much to sponsor this work. No problem.
They paid Ian Murdock about $10,000 for work on Debian. This is not a first.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Every publisher I've been talking with lately says they'd be willing to use an OSD-compliant license on their book as long as the license applies on the day that printed copies get to stores and not before. That sounds fair to me. It gives the publisher lead-time over the other publishers who did not pay for the work, and we get free documentation.
The down-side is that you might make less royalties on the book. Many of us can live with that, and if the author makes it clear to potential purchasers which publishers pay him a royalty and which do not, he might make a good lot of money anyway.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I seem to remember a project a few months ago where a group planned to write a book in a day to demonstrate the collaborative power of the internet. How about doing something like that with respect to a Gnome programming manual? The project would be done by hundreds of people... it may take more than the 24 hours allowed by the previous attempt, but that's ok. The money could then be donated back to some free software project. I may know nothing about programming Gnome, but I'd sure be glad to donate a little proofreading time.
By the way... and this is a bit off topic... does anyone know how that project turned out? Did they actually produce a book? If so, where can I take a look? I've been curious how that turned out, but never took the time to hunt it down.
Steve
Ah, another bogus attack on RMS and all his works. RMS has long said that free software needs free documentation, so that when new features are added to the program, these new features can be documented. This doesn't mean that every book telling how to use free software needs to be free, but it does mean that there needs to be at least one high-quality manual that is free. If others feel they can do a better job competing against the free manual, let them at it.
RMS wants a free manual, and he's putting his money where his mouth is. No author is obliged to accept his offer; furthermore, publishers like O'Reilly are free to fund other books. Free software and documentation are a part of the market. As a writer, you're simply going to have to deal with it.
You know, I have been very good in restraining myself, but this notion that RMS is some kind of "communist" is the worst kind of infantile name-calling. It shows very clearly that those who toss out such insults so casually have no concept of what RMS is trying to do and even less about what "socialist" or "communist" means.
RMS is a classic "liberal" in the original 18th century Enlightenment sense of that word.
You can agree or disagree with his project (and I find myself on one side or the other depending on the situation), but the name-calling only obscures the fundamental importance of the issues he has been raising.
--------
Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
In the US (I don't know about other places), if you buy a book and don't like it, you can return it to the bookstore for a refund. The bookstore then returns the book to the publisher, and the publisher gives the store credit for another purchase from that publisher. If the book is a mass-market paperback, the bookstore doesn't bother returning the whole book; it just returns the torn-off book cover.
This is an accountant's nightmare. The publisher can't predict how much profit a book has made until the returns bounce back. (On average, though, about half of all books sold are returned, so when you buy a book, you're really paying for the printing of two books.)
And as long as the publisher has books sitting in the warehouse, they're taxed at their current wholesale price, even if the publisher knows that a certain proportion of these copies are destined for Buck-A-Book.
And the people who own publishers don't simply want their companies to make money; they want them to make as much money as other businesses. A book that is likely to become gradually more popular over time, or a book that would have a small but devoted following, is therefore not a good investment for the publisher.
And most titles don't make money for their publishers; the profits from Stephen King and Robert Jordan novels cover the losses that their publishers suffer from promising but unsuccessful works by others.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
This might be a good project to try out on sourceXchange (once it is launched). If US$20k isn't enough, then perhaps if many more people put in about US$20 each, it would be plenty.
Well, how would you rate the relative enjoyment of coding and writing stand alone documentation? It's like comparing sex to getting your teeth cleaned.
I actually enjoy obsessing with documentation within my code (providing commentary around function prototypes and tables of contents in header files etc). But when it comes to writing stand alone docs, it's a necessary evil.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
After even writing a medium-sized grad thesis, I can tell you that writing a full, professional book is not to be taken lightly.
Don't even think about it unless you are an experienced programmer and writer.
$20k isn't that much when you consider that it may swallow a huge amount of your time, like all of it.
A more appropriate question: Where does the money go?
:)
Considering how time- and effort-intensive such an effort would be, and how much time it would take, it could easily take several months. It would take longer if you revised it along the way to keep pace with new/future GNOME versions. All told, the effort from start to publish could easily take a year. $20,000 is not that hefty for an annual salary, *especially* if you're supporting others besides yourself. If you have a job on the side, that's better and more secure, but it slows your production and you don't have much of a life worth speaking of.
A GNOME manual would be well worth having. As for your donations -- where else would you prefer they go? Especially since you will be able to procure the documentation for free? Also, a donation implies money given in free will, no strings attached -- you didn't give your donation with a legal clause attached specifying that it was not to be used to support documentation projects.
As someone who hopes to someday be a novelist --
Don't ever underestimate the monetary value of a writer's work.
The principle of aggrandizement is the fundamental law of every government. - Frederick the Great
> Just curious though, is there much more to
> GNOME programming that's not covered under GTK
> programming?
Probably yes. It would be very useful to have a
book that documented the GNOME component model (bonobo?) and othe GNOME specific APIs.
Deepak Saxena
Project Director, Linux Demo Day '99
Deepak Saxena
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers" - Picasso