what would you pay for good kernel documentation?

[Richard Weait]

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday-L09J2beyid0N/H6P543EQg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, Mike Kallies wrote:
>
>> ... but if the 200 page guide were a monthly posting on a blog, I'm
>> sorry to say that no, at this point in the history of the Internet,
>> *I* wouldn't pay for articles online.... and I can't justify to
>> management donating money to your website as a business expense :-)
>
>  *sigh*.  apparently, a colleague of mine was correct when i bounced
> this idea off him.  he told me flat out that it wouldn't work, and his
> reasoning was simply that the open source community has become
> pathetically spoiled by all their software being free, to the point
> where a lot of them think they're entitled to anything they want at no
> cost.

I think you missed Mike's smiley, Rob.

Linux users consistently pay more for pay-what-you-will software than
other OS users.  Here's one data point.  I remember seeing others
similar to this.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Linux-users-contribute-twice-as-much-as-Windows-users

Some web sites are able to collect donations for their operations.
Groklaw comes to mind, but I don't know any of the details.

And the OpenStreetMap community, not just Linux users but largely
F/LOSS users, were able to raise enough through donations for a new
database server last year in three days.

So I think your colleague is only seeing part of the picture.

That said, the F/LOSS community can be pretty selective about where it
chooses to offer financial support.  The F/LOSS community is also, as
a rule, pretty well connected and informed, and probably see "way too
many" sites seeking financial support.  Perhaps we've developed a
thick skin towards supporting web sites because we see so many web
sites that supporting all of them is out of the question.  Frankly we
run a lot of web sites too.
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