Am 19.04.2013 15:07, schrieb Lex Trotman:
Yes, packt exists and publishes books on computing topics. However I don't think much of their quality. And their spamming methods to find authors are questionable. A quick web search shows they do the same to many projects.
It appears they have some system of generating automatic "reminder" mails. I received a number of these during the last days and I really lost the last interest of maybe doing a project with them.
My concern is the potential impact on the Geany community, unless everyone agrees, if one person writes the book and gets paid, even a little, others may feel that they have been used, answering questions on the ML and IRC.
And the benefit to the community is likely to only be greater support requirements.
I don't see this in that way: Generally putting information into a book is a good chance to review current documentation and can bring back import for improving the general manual. Also it's a chance to explain things in a different way via a different medium. E.g. I got some smaller patches for documentation based on just translating them into German.
Also I don't see the "being used" as very problematic thing. Writing a (good) book is not the same as answering on IRC. In fact, putting information into a good technical one is much more about writing skills and description/explaining skills (and I think most of us are really sucking at these).
Also if you are not the coder kind of person, writing a book -- given that somebody is liking to spent money for -- might be a good way to pay the rent on one hand and improve free software on the other hand. (Many people just take software serious, if there are books about it.... just have a look onto public library and count how many books about $software you will find and have a look which software they are about)
BUT of course: if a book just puts content from IRC/manual between two book covers, the book is not needed, waste of time for author and editor and ppl from community will feel used -- me included.
So... I understand your censors, but I don't agree in all of them ;)
Cheers, Frank