Chris Barker wrote:
Tim Churches wrote:
I think there needs to be some community debate about this.
Well, no, there doesn't. Travis is doing two things:
1) Spending a great deal of his time producing some wonderful open source software.
2) Embarking on a small business venture, trying to sell books.
There is no need for community debate about an individual's business venture. It might benefit Travis to do a bit more market research, but as was pointed out, there's no reason he couldn't lower those limits and open source the book sooner if he chooses to.
Chris, I think you misunderstand what I meant - whic is clarified in another message I just posted a minute ago. I meant that there needs to be community debate over whether there is a requirement for a project to create free, open source documentation for SciPy Core, not over whether Travis does or doesn't have the right to, as you put it "...embark on a small business venture, trying to sell books.". I completely agree that he has every legal and moral right in the world to do that.
Travis Oliphant wrote:
I am interested in feedback. If you don't buy the book because you think I'm asking too much money, then let me know.
Since you ask, I think $39.99 is a bit steep for an electronic copy. As a quick comparison, I just bought the new wxWidgets book, documenting another open source project. You can get a printed copy from Amazon for $32.99.
I also do think Tim has a point. Usually the open source model is that the basic reference docs are freely available, and there are nice user and newbie friendly books for sale. It will be much harder for scipy.base to catch on if there are no freely available docs.
However, having looked at the little bit of the book that is now available, the quality and detail are far beyond what one usually finds in open-source references (with the possible exception of the python references). It certainly looks better than the old NumPy docs, which were still adequate.
I have no doubt that the NumPy community will produce some free "getting started" docs anyway, so we can all be happy. Maybe, as Tim suggests, we could fill a Wiki with the existing Numpy docs, and all start editing away!
Yup, that's all I had in mind. If, in fact we are allowed to edit the existing NumPy docs. If not, then a wiki to produce an addendum or set of annotations to them (like a Biblical concordance, perhaps) is the best that can be done. Tim C