Tuesday, January 21, 2020

The Meson Manual is now available for purchase

Some of you might remember that last year I ran a crowdfunding campaign to create a full written user manual for Meson. That failed fairly spectacularly, mostly due to the difficulty of getting any sort of visibility for these kinds of projects (i.e. on the Internet, everything drowns).

Not taking the hint I chose to write and publish it on my own anyway. It is now available on this web page for the price of 29.95€ plus a tax that depends on the country of purchase. Some countries which have unreasonable requirements for foreign online sellers such as India, Russia and South Korea have been geoblocked. Sorry about that. However you can still buy the book if you are traveling outside the country in question, but in that case all tax responsibilities for importing fall upon you.

What if you don't care about books?

I don't have a Patreon or any other crowdfunding thing ongoing, because of the considerable legal uncertainties of running a donation based service for the public good in Finland. Selling digital goods for money is fine, so this is a convenient way for people to support my work on Meson financially.

Will the book be made available under a free license?

No. We already have one set of free documentation on the project web site. Everyone is free to use and contribute that documentation. This book contains no text from the existing documentation, it is all new and written from scratch.

Is it available as a hard copy?

No, the only available format is PDF. This is both to save trees and because international shipping of physical items is both time consuming and expensive.

Getting review copies

If you are a journalist and wish to write a review of the book for a publication, send me an email and I'll provide you with a free review copy.

When was the book first made public?

It was announced at the very beginning of my LCA2020 talk. See it for yourself in the embedded video below.

Can you post about this on your favourite social media site / news aggregator / etc?

Yes, by all means. It is hard to get visibility without so I appreciate all the help I can get.

What was that site's URL again?


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4 comments:

  1. Sébastien WilmetJanuary 21, 2020 at 1:24 PM

    I think it's a great way to fund projects!

    To have better visibility you should add a link from https://mesonbuild.com/ to https://meson-manual.com .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JussiJanuary 21, 2020 at 2:57 PM

      Thanks. I plan to update the web site once a few higher priority issues have been dealt with.

      Delete
  2. zareami10January 21, 2020 at 7:48 PM

    Although I don't support non-free content, you're free to write a book and publish it as you like, but please do not assume how people use free content and bash them just because they won't support your campaign because you're not releasing your work under a free license.

    Here is a quick counter example: I pirate any non-free work, and also help for that cause if it's not already available.
    But if it's a free licensed book, I would actually love to buy it if I find it good enough.

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  3. UnknownJanuary 27, 2020 at 6:18 PM

    I'd like your book and support your work. What keeps me from buying is lack of other (safer?) payment option like PayPal or Google Pay.

    ReplyDelete