Guy Waterval wrote, > Why reinvent the wheel indeed. There's an existing structure and it would > be a good idea to integrate all the documentation writers in a unique > environnement. But before to invest a lot of time in such a document > project, there's perhaps a choice to do with the license. My personal > opinion is that we should adopt the Apache license to be coherent. If not, > it doesn't matter for the end users but isn't perhaps a good choice for the > project in the long term. In the other hand, I have to admit that there's a > lot of excellent existing materials by OOoAuthors that could be used... but > not with an Apache license.
We've had some discussions about using other systems for user docs, for example building on the Symphony documentation, but until a decision has been made (agreed upon) and the technical mechanisms put into place for implementing that decision, we seem to have a choice of using the ODFAuthors user guide material (with a non-Apache license) or effectively having no user guides at all. As I've said before, to me one of the biggest concerns is who is going to do the work. Will changing the production method, and the license, bring in enough new technical writers to replace those who may choose not to participate in the new way? Honestly, I don't know. Perhaps we'll end up with a set of "official" user docs (Apache license, non-book format) and a set of "community" user docs (CC-BY license, traditional book format). -Jean
