[beej71]

On that note, you can just do it for the good of the world. A lot of us have high-paying day jobs that can support us and good writing can be done on the side.

Benefits include not needing to hit some page count (so you can be concise), and bug reports from the community.

I don't look down at people who make money from books at all. I admire all writers and editors. (Some publishers can go f themselves, though. :)

But there is another path available to many of us, one that isn't driven by money. Remember the old hacker ethic!

[dinkleberg]

This does seem like the better path for a lot of people. A good article on this is https://sive.rs/balance.

[johnnyanmac]

>A lot of us have high-paying day jobs that can support us and good writing can be done on the side.

Meanwhile, me as a laid off gamedev counting pennies from the bits of freelance I can grab...

I guess that explains why so much gamedev literature is behind closed doors ($500 vault access for GDC. Or just oral knowledge inside industry) or non-existant. We can barely get good documentation, let alone technical literature. I'm guessing the energy expended from potentially 70+ hour crunch weeks doesn't leave much left for passion writing either.

[namaria]

Historically, great books and great science has not been made by people seeking to be paid. The profit motive muddles the water. Herodotos, Newton, Darwin, these guys were writing things worth thinking about. This is what makes society tick forward.

This whole idea of greed is good and the profit motive being the prime mover is a very recent and arguably detrimental mindset for the long term development of civilization.

[lofaszvanitt]

Nah, people should pay, at least a minimum amount for others's work. Look at open source, it's a mess, exactly because of the nonexisting payment layer. And what they used open source code? To bootstrap llms, for free.

[beej71]

I'm not saying you shouldn't pay others. I'm just saying that iff you have the means, you might consider doing the work for free.