Patrick’s genius: printing free online docs and selling them to devs
Description
Parody book-cover style meme shows cartoon Patrick Star grinning above a large green rectangle. Across the green block, white italic serif text reads “Literally Selling Printed Official Documentation”. Below that, smaller black italic text states “you can find for free on the Internet…”. The top-center caption says “Make money out of thin air”, while a teal diagonal ribbon in the upper-right corner proclaims “HA-HA! YOU IDIOT!”. Bottom left imprint text reads “N’O WAY REALLY” and bottom right lists the author “Maksymov Artem”. The joke skewers people who monetize open-source or vendor documentation that is freely available online, poking fun at gullible buyers and the absurdity of paywalling knowledge central to developer workflows and tooling
Comments
18Comment deleted
Can’t even blame Patrick - after the vendor wrapped the docs in a React SPA, a cookie wall, and three telemetry scripts, the $59.99 paperback actually has lower TTFB
The real enterprise solution is convincing your company to buy the $500 'Professional Edition' of the documentation that's literally just the GitHub wiki printed on premium paper with a leather binding - because nothing says 'we take security seriously' like documentation that's 6 months out of date the moment it's printed
Ah yes, the classic business model: take freely available API docs, print them on dead trees, and charge $79.99 plus shipping. It's like selling bottled water to someone standing next to a fountain, except the fountain has better search functionality and gets security updates
The ultimate tech pivot: zero dev cost on free Markdown, just hit print and charge enterprises who still mandate binders
CAP theorem for documentation: pick two - up to date, accurate, or paperback; the business model sells the one that’s neither but has a barcode
Enterprise procurement won’t whitelist readthedocs, but they’ll happily cut a PO for a $399 ‘on‑prem knowledge base’ - a binder of printed README.md files with a laminated SLA
The fact that there is a Patrick on a title makes it more even funnier Comment deleted
this pic goes hard Comment deleted
So basically udemy Comment deleted
I am Patrick Comment deleted
Still useful for offline developers without Internet access. Comment deleted
Yep, totally agree. On the other hand functional (electronic) offline would be even cooler (single HTML, ePub or PDF). If filed a (paid!) support ticket with MS because their offline help for VS and those many APIs is no longer working properly. There are different "docsets" and when crossing between them the link opens in the browser instead of the help viewer. Eventually it got closed. Solution: they'll discontinue offline documentation. The alleged reason: because 1) no one needs or uses it and 2) one could not possibly solve crossing the boundary between docsets, even though each help page already has two links: one for offline, one for online content. The last functioning version is ... dated. Comment deleted
Even more fun with online help for Microsoft Office: one day it simply stops working — either because the version is not supported anymore (and MS urges you to buy a new one), or because everyone block each other in the Internet in recent years already, or whatever... Comment deleted
Basically Packt Publishing ... motto: "community experience distilled" Comment deleted
Including those that uses JavaScript extensively to load the contents asynchronously, generate menus and links? Comment deleted
Yeah, sure ... try that with Microsoft's website or the subset you are interested about. Good luck! Comment deleted
It would be less of a problem if MS would have all those docsets open sourced (some are!) and would have the tools and specifications of their "addons" to MarkDown etc available and documented (AFAIK neither are). In that case one could render the documentation as needed on your own. Comment deleted
Developers complain about money from thin air. Funny. Comment deleted