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Re: Writing doc for open source software (was Help Needed -- Build Your Portfolio)

Subject: Re: Writing doc for open source software (was Help Needed -- Build Your Portfolio)
From: "Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 14:30:23 -0400


Janet Swisher wrote:

I'm interesting in having a discussion of writing documentation for open
source software (OSS). Why does it seem that there are so few tech writers
participating in OSS?

Becaues in order to document an OSS app you usually need to become intimately familiar with the code, while having minimal contact with the developers, and you need the ability to administer and install all the components of the platform infrastructure, and fix it yourself when it breaks in the middle of the night. Not all tech writers are able to do those things.

OTOH, I think there are a lot of tech writers who are 90% capable of doing OSS documentation, but they need a little help with the environment. So OSS developers, if they want professional tech writers to help out, would do well to offer some minimal "employee development" assistance.

For example, I'm not sure I could properly document a typical CRM app that uses Apache/PHP/Linux/MySQL without investing many months of evenings into just learning, setting up, and configuring the environment to run the application on. Sure, I have all that running now on my Linux box, but I can't say I'm expert on it, and if it breaks, it takes me a weekend of RTFMing to get it back up. In a corporate environment all that setup and maintenence is taken care of for you.

Mike O.

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