[iDC] mining open source

[Andreas Schiffler]

adam wrote:
> I think it would be interesting to turn some of the energy spent on FLOSS evangelism into energy for creating good professional documentation on free tools.
>   

Just wanted to mention that, as a FLOSS developer myself, I rarely - if 
ever - spend any time on evangelism.

The state of documentation for open source stuff comes very simply from 
the fact that its work to create good documentation - and its unpaid 
work. For example my SDL_gfx package that is part of many Linux distros 
now, was really developed while working on commercial stuff. I needed 
some functions, wrote the code, then published it. Of course it has 
basic documentation in form of a README.txt and webpage (which is the 
README.txt wrapped in <pre> tags). But other than that, I don't feel 
like making a nice PDF for it ... nor do any of the other thousands of 
people who use the library. In the 4 years of the libraries public 
existence, I've gotten 2 smallish additions as source code contributions 
and a few bug-reports. No documentation or nicely done manuals were ever 
requested or submitted.

Go and ask yourself this question: Which OSS tool are you using right 
now and find inadequately documented (or at least lacking in examples 
and training material). Would you spend 1-2 week of your time to 
research and write documentation, then get it published? And then commit 
to1 day a month for maintaining it for the next few years? And then face 
an interface or API change which makes your documentation partially 
obsolete?

Many projects these days adopt a Wiki structure for documentation - a 
maintainers time-saver, since many people can contribute in parallel and 
its fully searchable. But its not a printed manual. (Example: 
http://www.masonhq.com)

In my view, a well funded "bounty hunt" model would work great. See an 
example for the Gnome desktop project that is funded by Novell:
http://www.gnome.org/bounties/

So the question is: Why do Institutions have no "bounty hunt" budgets 
for their OSS use and deployments?


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