I think it's safe to say that users of ASF software buy their share of computer books. The online retailers, like Amazon.com, offer commission programs for people who link to their site.
The Apache Software Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation funded solely through donations from the community. To help offset the costs of ASF infrastructure, we could make it possible for ASF supporters to buy books about ASF project software through commission-program links. The commissions for such links is usually 5% or more. Given the vast number of books ASF supporters purchase, the commissions from these sales could become a respectable source of revenue. Setting up an online bookstore to benefit the ASF has been a longstanding itch of mine, which I've finally gotten a chance to scratch. A prototype bookstore is now available as a Confluence wiki. You can check it out at: * http://opensource.atlassian.com/confluence/oss/display/BOOKS/Home If anyone is interested in helping out with maintaining the site, please let me know. I'd especially welcome ASF project committers who'd like to help oversee the section about their project. If there was interest, we could also add pages for books recommended by ASF committers. Here, we could list other related books and off-topic items, like DVDs and CDs that we enjoy. There's an unfinished prototype of a committer page here: * http://opensource.atlassian.com/confluence/oss/display/BOOKS/husted If anyone would like to make any existing links commission-program links, there are instructions for how to do that on the bookstore Feedback page. * http://opensource.atlassian.com/confluence/oss/display/BOOKS/Feedback There is also a general FAQ on the Feedback page. Of course, this is a 100% volunteer effort and 100% of all commissions are donated directly to the Apache Software Foundation. Comments and suggestions are welcome. I'm sending this message to dev@ for each Project with a category in the online bookstore. After getting feedback from the dev lists, a broader announcement would be made. -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
