Docbook and a Glazed Lists Profit Model

I think that Glazed Lists has to be open source for the project to be successful. Currently the project progresses because of the charity of myself, Kevin Maltby, James Lemieux, and O'Dell Engineering Ltd. Although these contributions are voluntary, I think that we need a profit strategy for the project. The project doesn't need to make anybody rich but it should pay for itself.

Meanwhile, I'm planning on revising the project tutorial for the upcoming 1.0 release. I've decided to switch to Docbook, which is the ideal hacker's publishing tool. Docbook exports 'real documents' like paper and PDF and people have been known to pay for these things.

Should I write a Glazed Lists book and sell it, then use that money to further finance Glazed Lists?

I think the book is a very clean profit strategy:

Everyone can convince their boss to drop $40 on a book

Still open source in its purest form

Encourages further documentation on the project

But it has its downsides:

I'd have to write a book

Would enough people buy it to justify its expense (in terms of my time)

I think I'll wait for the big 1 dot owe, and then give this some further thought.

# posted by Jesse Wilson on Wednesday, December 01, 2004