A (currently theoretical) question concerning a book about the Kolab Server

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Hi!

As some of you may know I recently wrote a book about the Linux
distribution Gentoo
(https://www.opensourcepress.de/index.php?26&tt_products=144).

While I like Gentoo my main area of activity is the Kolab groupware
and I'd be really interested in writing a handbook for administrators
of the Kolab server.

Ideally that book would be available in print but free in its
electronic version as PDF. This is a model currently not supported by
my publisher OpenSourcePress. They rely of course on the income made
with the books in whatever format.

So I could choose to tackle that project on my own. But that would
have significant drawbacks. I'd probably only invest time when I have
it which would mean it would be a project that takes ages. And I'd
loose the very valuable influx of knowledge from the publisher. 

I know very well from the experience with the Gentoo book that their
input has a very high value. What I was capable of writing and
submitting into their subversion system miraculously turned into
readable text with the next revision I checked out. And I think I'm
not yet lost deep enough in code that I would underestimate the value
a well readable technical documentation has.

I do see parallels with the free software provided by the Kolab
Konsortium. It is actually a quite amazing success that the consortium
manages to publish a free groupware server that is commercially
viable. Companies are willing to pay for feature enhancements such as
the port of Kontact to Windows or the start of the SyncML support to
name some recent ones. In my eyes it is a fantastic achievement by the
companies driving the Kolab project that such things are automatically
contributed back to the community.

So I'm wondering if there'd actually be enough financial interest in a
book about Kolab. This is still a completely hypothetical question as
I didn't consider the important parameters of such a project yet. I'd
expect the costs to be somewhere in the range of twenty to thirty
thousand Euros for convinving the publisher to agree to the model with
a non-free print version and a free PDF.

So right now I'm just looking for some comments to start getting some
ideas and a better grasp of the potential problems that one would need
to solve.

Thanks!

Gunnar

-- 
____ http://www.pardus.de _________________ http://gunnarwrobel.de _

E-mail : p at rdus.de                                 Dr. Gunnar Wrobel
Tel.   : +49 700 6245 0000                         Bundesstrasse 29
Fax    : +49 721 1513 52322                        D-20146 Hamburg
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