[peterarmstrong]

By the way, another way to get financial support for an open source project is to sell a short tutorial book. For example, the creator of Laravel did this on Leanpub (disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Leanpub) and did pretty well: https://leanpub.com/laravel is #7 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub. (Also, one of the core contributors on Laravel has done even better: https://leanpub.com/codebright is #2 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub.) Similarly, the creator of Trailblazer is doing pretty well recently with his Leanpub book: https://leanpub.com/trailblazer is #9 in revenue over the past week.

Anyway, my point is that even if you're in a niche, if you are the clear expert in that niche (say if you created the framework, or in your case, the software), then a book may be one worthwhile component of a monetization strategy. If you can sell a $30 book to 4000 people, you can earn some decent money. (The royalties on a $30 book on Leanpub are $26.50, so multiplying by 4000 results in over $100K.)

[teddyh]

“Given that writing good English is a rare skill among programmers, we can ill afford to lose manuals this way.”

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html

[ianai]

Even more if you can tie it in with enough topics for a textbook.

[peterarmstrong]

Hopefully one day textbook prices can return to a sane level, say between $30 and $80. Today's textbook racket (I don't want to call it a market) is obscene.