[OpenLayers-Users] OpenLayers Book

[Lehtonen, Mika]

I agree on financing model, absolutely. Making the access subscription 
based, in my opinion, would break the open source principle. But who 
would write the documentation? I have been noticing that the deeper you 
get in any thing, less you know what's happening on the surface. Are all 
the user-list members competent on writing documents (or code)? No 
they're not, at least I'm not. On the other hand who knows the most of 
the code? I think it's he/she who wrote it.

I am 38 and started learning programming as a hobby when I was 35. Now I 
am getting my bread and butter of it. It's not so easy to learn any more 
in this age + kids + wife + life. Still, I have thought this open source 
issue so, that one day I will start contributing to the community. Until 
that time, I will be a party that gets more than gives. So people who 
have got deep should understand that they can't assume that everyone in 
the users list are able to write documentation and code. Why would we 
ask simple questions, if we were competent on writing documentation on 
our own?

I personally like PostGIS documentation [ 
http://postgis.refractions.net/documentation/ ]. Could OpenLayers 
documentation be like it? For those who prefer more printed 
documentation, could be published e.g. PDF-versions, right? And if the 
format and the layout is proper, it's not so expensive to make some 
printing office to print books even the number of them would be small. 
They have digital printing presses nowadays.

- mika -

David Fawcett kirjoitti:
> I would be happy to kick in $25 - $50 to support the production of
> documentation.  Instead of making access to documentation subject to a
> donation, I would rather have any donation money leveraged by making
> more documentation available to as many people as possible.  People
> who have never used OpenLayers, people looking for a new solution,
> etc.  Evangelism vs subscription.
>
> I understand what Chris is saying.  Some people get off on coding and
> are willing to spend their personal time writing code for a project
> that they think is worth while.  These same people may not find the
> same pleasure in writing documentation.  (not many people do...)
>
> I think that the key to grass roots documentation development is to
> encourage people who are OpenLayers users who are not core developers,
> who want to give something back to the project to write documentation.
>  While it would be cool to have a paper book, it would start to become
> out of date as soon as it was published.  The same amount of resources
> and time, contributed by a larger group of people, could create (and
> maintain) some really great web-based documentation.
>
> David.
>