> As the efforts of the GitBook team are focused on the GitBook.com platform, the CLI is no longer under active development.
— https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook#%EF%B8%8F-deprecation-w...
Seriously- what are the monetization strategies for open source projects? I know red hat, hashicorp and others sell a enterprise support and hosting solution as enterprise add ons to their open source projects. Wordpress seems like a great community built around building widgets for non technical folks, but have the source code available for programmers to extend and modify.
Is it possible for one to sell software and have it open source?
That being said, it seems like a doomed SaaS because the value add is pretty minimal. Maybe a one time charge would make sense, but I can’t find much value in monthly fees for something I can host on github.io for free.
The software is nice, but there are others.
In general, I don’t like “artificial” SaaS where the the fee is rent-seeking for something software runs for near zero marginal costs.
It was cool that they left cli around, but as abandonware.
I thought it strange that it was such a non open source behavior to only support their monthly service even though one of the main benefits I see in static site generators is the flexibility of hosting and cost.
I feel bad for them as it must be a hard business to compete with Bookdown and other projects.
I’m fairly happy with mdbook (although it took some time to get the customizations work correctly)
I totally get storing the markdown files/folders in git, but surely any other version control system would be fine too?
Books as git repos instead of static seems obvious, even inevitable, eventually, to me.
It became clear to me that, internally some sort of scaling problem is present in the code that manifests itself abruptly once the book hits a certain size.
Rendering to html would take 2-3 minutes (attempting to reload the latest version of a single page also triggers a complete re-rendering of all pages, obviously making the process non-feasible).
I migrated to bookdown that renders the entire book in about 10 seconds (and reloads single pages quickly).
I wonder if honkit fixed those internal design errors that made gitbook unusuable for me.
Gitbook predates that’s so it may have been grandfathered.
The author recently renamed "GitHon" to "HonKit" due to Git being protected by U.S. trademark law.
