Initial thought.

This reads largely like a recapitulation of Boehm's 2003 book "Balance Agility and Discipline" [1]. Have you read this and did this provide any inspiration for the article?

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Balancing-Agility-Discipline-Guide-Pe...

I haven’t read it but I’ll put it on my reading list, thanks.

I totally agree with the 'Risk-first' approach. This idea fits in very nicely with risk driven technical assurance, where the goal of project reviews (even including those covering pre-project activities such as bidding) is to quantify and mitigate the risk to the business. Such assurance provides an outer shell for engineering activities such as software development.

Much needed effort, thanks. How do you see the ongoing relationship between the book and multi-contributor website? How did that influence the selection of an Apache 2 (intended for code) vs CC-BY (intended for content) license?

That's an excellent question, and one I'm currently struggling with.

On the one hand, I would like to grow Risk-First as a community, and get other people authoring articles. With this in mind, I am trying to automate the process by which collaborators are added to the github organisation... it's manual at the moment which is already painful.

On the other hand, I wanted to publish this work in order that it could be read off-line (in print form, should be ready end of Feb) or on a kindle (which is currently pre-order). This _probably_ won't generate much income as it essentially is content that is already for free on the website.

Probably, the license is sufficiently permissive that other people could also publish the work as a book for their own means, so long as they retained attribution or copyright notices. I guess this is the usual quandary on making anything open-source.

I expect you're right that the license _should be_ CC-BY. I need to investigate further on this. Do you have any further thoughts on this?

CC licenses have been vetted by content publishing lawyers in many countries. CC-BY 4.0 enables commercial re-use.

The Apache license was designed to manage software specific risks.

For the book, you can have a few chapters which are proprietary, clearly marked as such in the book, with the CC chapters explicitly identified. That allows anyone to republish/derive the CC chapters, but not the proprietary chapters. There might be a natural separation between community-authored content and your analysis/perspective chapters.

CC-BY 4.0 also allows derivatives of the community content to be proprietary, so the entire book can remain commercial. There are other CC licenses (share-alike) which have GPL-like qualities. It depends on which outcomes you want to incentivize, and how much effort you want to put into management of content origin, derivatives and/or issuing DMCA takedown notices to Amazon.

For revenue models, look at softcover.io, which provides free-to-read content with upsells to paid ebook and video. It has generated several hundred $K for the Ruby on Rails tutorial. The author has previously posted about this on HN.

That's very helpful advice, thanks a lot.

I like the images. What was used to create that?