Re: Sponsorship Funding of the LDP

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>]

I don't mean to imply 'owe' in the sense of a gangster contract ;)

I mean simply that if I help my neighbour clean his eavestroughs,
he's more likely to respond favourably if I ask him to help me cut
high branches from my trees.  We have been generous to the publishers
so it just seems neighbourly they'd respond favourably to helping the
LDP.

>>>>> "t" == terry  <terry@animats.net> writes:

    t> I think it portrays the LDP in a favourable light to be seen to
    t> be working in association with the commercial publishing
    t> community.

I probably get along with publishers because my purpose is to "spread
the good word" about using Linux, and they make money transporting those
words.  Its a natural fit.  If the LDP mandate is to produce the best
quality free docs, that is just more words for the publishers to transport
and the aims are in sync --- we have more in common with them than any
other industry because, unlike software, we deal only in ideas.  Both
of us deal in software for wetware, not hardware.

If I were directing the LDP, though, I'd move even closer together. I
would have the mandate focus enclusively on Linux education.  It would
be "a project to document Linux" and say nothing about ownership.  LDP
would be a conduit where any document relating to Linux could be
found, whether free, OPL or commercial.  The LDP would be as much a
"metadocument" as an actual repository. If it teaches Linux, it would
be within the mandate.  Where licences _permit_, I would distribute
the contents, but even where copyright, if someone has a good book
about a topic, I'd present community reviews and make a few bucks
selling it through FatBrain or something.

I'd have a long-term goal to produce The Linux Document Project, a
cohesive and encyclopaedic web of interrelated documents which, as a
whole, leaves no corner undocumented.  It would have elements of
Knuth's Literate Programming to fold docs into source code (also
properly indexed and cross-referenced by the supporting docs) and
would guide Linux projects on how to implement this into their
process. The objective would be the science fiction world where,
starting from any vantage point, from the Help button, from a website,
from line 125 in smp.h, you could enter a vast repository that would
explain via hypertext as much detail as anyone would ever care to
explore.

"I've been called an evil genius by whole cities of assholes, but I know
who they are, and they are on my list" (Robert Crumb)

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@linux.ca>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723
TCI - Business Innovations through Open Source : http://www.teledyn.com
Canadian Co-ordinators for Bynari International : http://ca.bynari.net/
Moderator, Linux Education Group: http://www.egroups.com/group/linux-ed


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