[FM Discuss] writing conventions

[Janet Swisher]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Bill
McConnaughey<mcconnau at biochem.wustl.edu> wrote:
> Mea culpa, apropos logging in to make one minor formatting change in
> CommandLineIntro. Actually, I'm reading through it and fixing minor errors
> and improving (I hope) explanations as I go along. I'm also thinking about
> a new section on making a commandline interface for a new program, using
> readline and such.

Nothing to apologize for. As Adam said, this is a necessary part of
the ecology of the project. Fixing minor errors and improving
explanations along the way is a valuable activity that improves the
overall quality of the content. And if you also add a new chapter,
that's gravy.

> I can see how there could be tension between maintaining the FM brand vs.
> having complete freedom to present FM material together with proprietary
> stuff. Maybe the boundary should look like this:  FM makes manuals that
> only talk about FLOSS, and also has some sort of cross-reference index on
> the website listing software from all sources that provide a given
> capability. That would help people who want to migrate to FLOSS, and it
> would help the free software community to avoid falling into isolation and
> ignorance. And consistent with the FM philosophy, there would be no
> attempt to restrict how people use FM material elsewhere.

I agree. At this point, it seems to me that FLOSS Manuals should focus
on texts about FLOSS, but that if a group like Sesawe wants to use
that content as part of their work that has a different focus
(censorship) and combine it with content that isn't about FLOSS, as
long as they honor the license, it's all good.

Furthermore, if someone puts a different cover on FM books and makes
more money from them, it's probably because they added something that
has more value *even if it is just more effective marketing*. If that
happens, we should either learn from what they're doing, or decide not
to pursue that extra revenue that they manage to capture.

--Janet