For some months by browsing HN, I've been amazed at how many open books written by normal people (self-published resources) that need to be discovered. So I was wondering: is there anywhere a list of "open" books? Let's give some authors some notoriety, if you found one, please comment below!
A books/resource to be defined as "open source" should have the following features:
- have a good quality content – it is a little bit hard to achieve, especially when you do not have money to hire editors;
- be free as PDF/HTML, but the author can still have donations, or can be paid for hardcopies;
- anyone can contribute to writing or editing! e.g. "source code"/content of the book is hosted in a Git instance;
* https://ebookfoundation.github.io/free-programming-books/boo...
* https://ebookfoundation.github.io/free-programming-books/boo...
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All my books are free to read online and markdown sources are available on GitHub: https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks
I read this book years ago, and still read it now.
Open source doesn't mean open to contributions! For example, SQLite is open-source, but is not open to contributions: https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html
> SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution.
There's also an article by Rich Harris that explain the difference between open source and open contribution: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95.... An extract:
> Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense of communal entitlement.