Lest anyone think we're alone...

[Karsten Wade]

On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 22:09 +0300, John Babich wrote:

> I read all three related entries. I've been doing research on open
> source projects and the good news is  - the first step to a solution
> is realizing there is a problem. There is some truth to the maxim,
> "Misery loves company".

Yes, and as you have already imagined, many projects are in this first
step, and know it, and aren't sure how to move from there.

> There's also truth in "United we stand, divided we fall". I think the
> solution is inherent in the open source development process.

For my comments inline, I offer some of the reasons why I think it
hasn't really been done.  I do think it is possible, but I don't think
we've found the form for it yet.  I have my doubts that it is going to
look much like what we cobble together today; that is, the UIs may be
familiar, but the back-end magic is going to need to be new.  Back-end
magic includes technical components and intra-project relationships.

So, to be clear, I'm "totally into" this idea, which is Californiaese
for, "Yes, let's do it."

I'd like to see some input from across this project and mailing list; we
have quite a few people who lurk here and have insight.

Hey, Debianistas!  Ubuntuarians!  Suseneros!  Solarisas!  Slackers!
Gentootians!

And every other project large and small!?!

If there is enough interest here to really get something of this
magnitude started, let's knock around all the tough stuff for a few
weeks.  I'd like to sponsor a teleconference + IRC + gobby +
$whiteboard-app mini-summit for all those who are interested in moving
this forward.  From today, it seems like January would be a good time;
give us about five to six weeks of mailing list activity and research
before getting together to hammer out a proposal to take to other FLOSS
projects.

> ************************************************************************
> We need a well-defined FOSS project to create a completely
> free (livre) toolchain to create, maintain, distribute and publish
> FOSS documentation.
> ************************************************************************

This is interesting, the focus/inclusion of toolchain within this.  I'll
get back to that.

> This project is bigger than all of us. This is where we need to
> realize that the entire FOSS community needs to be involved. Every
> FOSS project needs documentation. It seems every project also has a
> problem producing it.

For example, a couple of years ago at LWCE San Franciso, I had a great
conversation with Greg from the cAos project.  It was exactly around
this topic, having a common body/pool of documentation that all distros
could put into and pull from.

After that conversation, I got a nice glass of cold water poured on the
idea from a Fedoran at our booth. *cough*Spot*cough*  After some
reflection, I realized that he was (in the main) correct.

> I propose we spearhead a FOSS community-wide project. This naturally
> involves upstream and cross-stream participation and cooperation.

The cold water treatment reminded me of some key items:

1. There aren't as many commonalities between distros as there are
differences

2. Any body that does this work is going to spend a significant amount
of time dealing with politics and in-fighting

3. Tools

When considering 1, if we want to include the whole range of FLOSS
projects (i.e., our entire upstream), that is much huger than just a
derived set of common docs across distros.

The politics, well, that's just going to require time to settle down. :)

In the end, it might be the last one that is the true challenge.  People
like what they like and don't want to change over to what I like or what
you like.  If we don't want to make fixing the attitude of all
communities a part of this cross-FLOSS documentation project, we have to
find a way to extrapolate content, semantics, and meta-information from
n+1 content tools.  And then figure out how to inject it back in.

> BTW, if this project already exists, please let me know. I would like
> to join it.

There are a lot ways to consider from here, for example:

1. LDP -- The Linux Documentation Project exists already, and it has
done the best (only?) job so far at being generic and cross-distro
useful.  We could work with content that is made generic for LDP as an
upstream, then we can take it as downstream users and add our patches
that make it Fedora specific.  We may want to do that with all content
that ranges from "How to use a mouse" to "Customizing the desktop".
Think of this as the, "Invest in giving more life to LDP as a common
upstream."

2. Upstream.  Following the idea from above, we can work to improve the
documentation that exists in upstream projects.  Everything from
man/info through README and HTML files.  Massive coordination effort, on
the scale of the entire distro (number of packages/projects), just with
fewer bits and complexity.  

3. Distro only.  We could start a new, cross-distro documentation
commons.  Maybe use an existing umbrella organization to work under, so
it can hold single control (joint copyright, etc.), sort of like an FSF
for documentation.  One issue that comes up immediately is license,
which is where the common upstream entity is valuable.  It can provide
multiple licenses for downstream use, who would have to multi-license (n
+1) all content they contributed back up.  Lots of complexity, and we
need to research the actual value.  For example, how much work would
this be v. putting human energy into converting all man pages to XML and
making a Web interface (Wiki) for editing them.  This cross-project
would be a lot of effort into interacting components.  The "Wiki in
front of man pages" would be putting content editing directly in the
control of the communities, and then we all just advertise
manpagecommons.org/wiki. :)

What other ways could we tackle this?

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, 108 Editor    ^     Fedora Documentation Project 
 Sr. Developer Relations Mgr.     |  fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
   quaid.108.redhat.com           |          gpg key: AD0E0C41
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