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

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de> writes:

> Am Donnerstag, 10. Juli 2008 13:33:33 schrieb Gunnar Wrobel:
>> 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.
>
> There is some interested in documentation,
> as you can see from the operating system manual in German available from 
> http://kolab.org/documentation.html which a customer of the Kolab-Konsortium
> contracted.
>
> (One of the next steps probably would be to translate this nice manual.)
>  
>> 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.
>
> There are two problems that I see:
> a) people just expect the documentation to be there, so it probably will need 
> to be cross financed from other Kolab business.

Yes, for commercial software that is certainly the case. Kolab is kind
of on a middle ground here. Most of the admins in a Linux environment
probably know a good deal of software packages that don't provide
decent documentation so the expectations are probably less high.

> While it is commericially viable for KK to run a large portions of
> the Kolab community efforts, the level could be better for
> maintenance and documentation. It will largely depend on how good KK
> will manage to get business and how fair users are inclined to pay
> for good service which includes running infrastructure and
> documentation.

For most other software projects I wouldn't even have dared to mention
the idea. The fact that KK is successfully running a commercial free
software product and actively paying for community work is not common
at all. I think in most cases the only choice is writing stuff and
give your copyright to the publisher. Which is kind of weird when the
software you write is free.

I agree that some of this probably has to be cross-financed but I hope
there might be some companies or people willing to also contribute
just for the sake of having better documentation.

>
> b) Technically a good manual must be changed in the moment the software is 
> changed, so it must be part of the software development process. For this the 
> documentation must be part of public infrastructure of the kolab.org 
> community.

I don't see that as a problem but as a requirement. The content
definitely would need to be available via the wiki, too. And work on
any texts would take place in a version controlled repository in any
case.

Cheers,

Gunnar

>
> Best,
> Bernhard
>
>
> -- 
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