On 17.01.2005, at 14:18, Rich Bowen wrote:
FYI
I mentioned this back in August, and folks expressed their opinions pretty clearly. But I wanted to forward this along, just to let you know. I don't expect anyone's opinion has changed.
I can only speak for myself but no, not really - see my comments below...
- -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Apache Documentation available in ThoutReader format Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:10:26 -0800 From: Mark D. Carey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: OSoft.com To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Rich,
Sorry for the second message. The first one bounced back to me as undeliverable. Original message follows:
My partner Gary Varnell and I met you at the OS convention in Portland, OR
this past July. We are the guys who developed the program called the
ThoutReader?, the open source documentation platform that allows developers
to browse ? search ? bookmark ? and append all of their OS documentation and
favorite reference books in one common format. [The ThoutReader? is licensed
under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2, June 1991.
I am writing because we need your assistance. Yesterday we posted to our
website www.osoft.com the Apache 2.0 documentation in the ThoutReader?
format and the response has been overwhelming.
Overwhelming? http://www.osoft.com/store/productdetails.php?pid=43&cPath=7&cid=7&it=5 shows 237 downloads so far and a total of two comments, hmm... and they're using The Feather, arghh!
We now have documentation for
Apache, PHP, MySQL, BSD, Perl, and some Linux. In December, MySQL adopted
the ThoutReader? as an approved format for their documentation and now offer
it from their website. We would like to accomplish the same thing with
Apache as an option to your current documentation format. You do not have to
be online to read documentation with the ThoutReader?. We developed an XSLT
to convert Docbook to the ThoutReader? format and we would be happy to give
this to Apache.org for future use.
Is this an offer to build the stuff which would be needed or is this just some sort of hand-waving? I wouldn't have a problem with an additional, properly integrated doc format but this sounds very much like: "please do this so that we can increase our profits", not nice...
Every bit of our documentation is available in XML through different channels (SVN, rsync, ...) so why can't they just figure out how to get it transformed into their format, send in a patch and hope the best - just as everybody else does?
You and Ken Coar are the only two guys I have met on the Apache
Documentation Project and I am not sure how to proceed. I believe there is a
documentation committee and I would ask that you take a moment to download
the Apache Documentation in the ThoutReader? format and try it out. We would
like to partner with you on the documentation project and believe the
ThoutReader? has a lot to offer the open source community. We are
particularly interested in any other content you might like to publish in
the ThoutReader? format that could benefit the Apache community.
I really don't like this sort of 'back-channel prodding' - hey, we have a website with a lot of information on how to contact us, there's even a mailing list and they can just send a message to it, so where's the problem?
Cheers, Erik
[Rich, this isn't anything against you - I'm just commenting on the original, forwarded message...]
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