Do you have to fight your editors to let you publish such long books? If so, I'm glad you won the fight in Cryptonomicon, but in Quicksilver I wish your editors had fought a little harder.
Yeah, this drives me absolutely nuts. Open source creates a huge number of niches for profitable commercial (even closed-source companies). The for-profit company just has to pick an area of specialty that the open source community is not likely to want to fill. For example, build a php web application for a particular target market that's easy enough to set up and use that a non-programmer can do it. You just have to accept the fact that in certain areas... um, webservers, operating systems, you would get your butt kicked so don't bother.
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Do you have to fight your editors to let you publish such long books? If so, I'm glad you won the fight in Cryptonomicon, but in Quicksilver I wish your editors had fought a little harder.
Yeah, this drives me absolutely nuts. Open source creates a huge number of niches for profitable commercial (even closed-source companies). The for-profit company just has to pick an area of specialty that the open source community is not likely to want to fill. For example, build a php web application for a particular target market that's easy enough to set up and use that a non-programmer can do it. You just have to accept the fact that in certain areas... um, webservers, operating systems, you would get your butt kicked so don't bother.