Re: Speaking of Jason Rudolph and Groovy...

You might consider having two versions of your book - one free and a 
fuller version paid for.

Many open-source projects have one main company behind them that 
operates that way (sells an enhanced version separately) and I think it 
works.

As to your original question as to selling open-source-related services, 
there are companies doing that successfully, often with a Team approach. 
  One might consider putting together a Team or at least offering the 
services through a company name to allow later scalability.

Some companies may want proprietary extensions of open-source, but 
others should be able to appreciate the benefits of having the code 
contributed to the open-source code base so that it will be widely 
supported.  Hopefully, they are at least somewhat friendly to the 
open-source idea or they would not use open source in the first place. 
But I suspect that both types of customers exist.

I suspect that there multiple niche opportunities in this area......



Ed Burnette wrote:
>>From Digg:
>> It's a free eBook (pdf), including code samples. Of course
>> you may also support his work, by buying the printed copy.
> 
> As a reader, that's great. I love free ($0) stuff. I can download it without even thinking about it and use it at my leisure.
> 
> As an author, how does that work? Many people asked for a free copy of my GWT book (http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ebgwt), or complained that it wasn't free (it's $8.50). What's my incentive for spending months working on something, putting it out there for free, and everybody says "thanks", takes it, and walks off? I could be wrong but I can't see many of the free downloads converting to sales.
> 
> Unlike open source code, the book has no value to me once it's written since I already know the subject. So I'm not "scratching an itch". I could spend that time blogging, writing code, hanging out on the newsgroups, giving presentations, or something else, and that might be more productive for me personally or for the community.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Aside: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/grails says 'download this book free' but http://www.lulu.com/content/618462 says the download is $12.80, what's up with that?
> 
> Aside2: For groovy fans, I've heard good things about Groovy in Action, http://www.manning.com/koenig/ . 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:49:53 -0500
> From: Jared Richardson <[email protected]>
> Subject: [Juglist] Speaking of Jason Rudolph and Groovy...
> To: Harold Meder <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> 
> 
> Jason's book just came out!
> 
> If you're the digging sort, have at it.
> 
> http://digg.com/programming/InfoQ_eBook_Getting_Started_with_Grails
> 
> Jared
> http://JaredRichardson.net
> 
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