Documentation Process

Books

The main documentation of OpenERP is composed of a set of books according to the business need. These books are reviewed once a year. We are working with authors/contributors/employees/translators to build chapters on the different aspects of the ERP. As to motivate people to write quality documentation,

This section describe how we collaborate with authors and translators to provide a very good documentation on OpenERP. As to motivate people to write quality documentation/chapters we set up author rights to pay every contributor and translator according to their effort.

Building a Book

We have contract with several editors to publish books in different countries.

Once we have enough chapters written, we can compose a book and publish it.

Books are first published in a paper version. Three months after, we release it online.

Author Rights

The typical author rights are between 8% and 10% on the public price, according to the authors, the country and the editor in which the book will be published. This commission is on the public price, no matter of the final selling price per item.

These author rights have to be divided according to people working on the book:

• Reviewers: 10% to be divided by number of reviewers
• Translators: 30% to be divided by the number of translators
• Authors: the rest (60%-90%) to be divided by number of authors

As an example, Geoff and Fabien worked on the french and english book on OpenERP. This book is sold at a public price of 35 EUR with 10% author rights. We had one reviewer for this book from Eyrolles. So author rights are splitted in that way:

• Geoff: 1.575 EUR/book (= 35 * 0.1 * (0.9 / 2))
• Fabien: 1.575 EUR/book
• Reviewer: 0.35 EUR/book (= 35 * 0.1 * 0.1)

Once this book will be translated to Hungarian, with a public price of 30 EUR and author rights of 10% (0.1) we will have:

• Geoff: 1.05 EUR/book (=30 * 0.1 * 0.7 / 2)
• Fabien: 1.05 EUR/book
• Hungarian translator: 0.90 EUR/book (=30 * 0.1 * 0.30)

Author rights are paid every 3 months, after one month. (to be verified according to what we can do with editors)

People

Authors

Everyone can be an author and write a complete book or just one or several chapters on particular aspects of OpenERP. Chapters are then review

Authors from Tiny

At Tiny (the editor of OpenERP), each employee can write a few chapters based on new module he wrote for specific customers, at the end of the project. As employees get a salary to write these chapters during their working hours, author rights are computed slightly differently:

• Computed rights are divided by two for the employee: 50%
• Valid until the employee work for Tiny

Modules

Each module should have a small and minimal documentation.

Building the documentation

We use Sphinx, a documentation generator, to build the documentation. So, Sphinx should be installed on your system and you should know how to use it.

You can install it with easy_install. For example, on Ubuntu:

sudo easy_install sphinx

building the documentation in html:

make clean
make html

building the documentation in pdf:

make clean
make latex
cd build/latex
make all

building a book:

For example, if you want to build the Open ERP for Retail and Industrial Management book:

cd books/book_mrp
make clean
make latex
cd build/latex
make all

FAQ

How much items can we expect to sell for a book ?

The first french book we wrote is sold at 500 items per month. It’s good as it was our the first book on OpenERP but we can expect better results with an english version. So probably between 250 and 1500 items per month for an english book.