Succeeding with Open Source

JBoss Documentation

As noted in Chapter 7, “Open Source Documentation,” JBoss is unusual because the project team funded creation of high-quality documentation by selling it, rather than giving it away as is common for most other open source projects. Even though the documentation is quite inexpensive, the total revenues sufficed to support the technical writer who created it. Many postings, both in product forums and Web sites, praised the for-pay documentation. On the other hand, many people criticized the free documentation available with the product; among the complaints were poor writing, incompleteness, and obsolescence. This reinforces the observation made in Chapter 7 that open source software engineers do not create very good documentation. ...