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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be, in effect, advertising for a book about how to use the underlying FOSS software to do this.

I would be okay with that as a monetization model, except that the book author despite being a self-described FOSS dev doesn't seem to have anything to do with the project (https://github.com/beancount/beancount/graphs/contributors).

Ah, not quite true. The author fixed a typo in a docstring once (https://github.com/beancount/beancount/commit/8584763b618f76...).

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Aside from the fact that writing a book about Beancount is a positive contribution, the author maintains a list of Beancount resources[0] and has written several beancount plugins.[1, 2, 3, 4] I have personally benefited from his contributions to the Beancount ecosystem.

Can you point to some of your contributions to this project?

[0] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/awesome-beancount

[1] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-n26

[2] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-ing

[3] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-dkb

[4] https://github.com/siddhantgoel/beancount-commerzbank

If you look at their personal profile they've made a lot of content with activity and collaboration outside of the main beancount repo, related to beancount. They definitely meet the criteria for 'FOSS dev' in that it's FOSS, too.

Thanks. I was not denying the author FOSS creds generally, just expecting actual involvement. It seems this is someone who cares about the project (and I do like the sound of the project).

I'm just, you know, pretty sensitive to HN submissions trying to sell me something.

Oh no, someone might make some money off work they did that was related to work a different somebody did! What a travesty! Somebody stop him!

I know money is the root of all evil and all that, but a total aversion to it isn't a very healthy way of interfacing with it at all.

And only... what, Italians, can write books on the Romans?

That’s a bad analogy because the qualification is being born in a region not acquiring knowledge thru working. an equivalent would be only electrician can write a book on wiring.

Do you mean wire and tool manufacturers? Electrician is mostly a user. Or to avoid flawed analogies - should books on Windows, Office, ... be only limited to a small subset of Microsoft employees? I'd assume the book is for users, what does it matter if the author contributed to the project?

And that's still ignoring that evangelism is also a valuable contribution.

That was exactly why I picked it as an extreme example to show the absurdity of this rule - there aren't any Legionnaires to write the books, so who's allowed to? Assuming we do want the books.

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