Oblomovka

2004-07-30»

Okay, now I joined Andy Oram talking about Splitting Books Open: Thoughts on the Digital Future of Technical Documentation.

He’s talking about the difficulties of “community documentation”. Describes his struggles to find out how Trackback works. How hard it was — there’s an ecology of self-education on the Net, but it’s hard to drill down to the right place. So traditional documentation has some place in the modern technical world.

What are the advantages of a good book? Can this be replicated in community education?

Firstly: Pace. Revealing the answers in the right order. There’s an idea of audience – technical reviews, focus groups and so forth. Background: books can gather together relevant and enlivened background. Structure: like pace, but on a larger scale. “Life in general is getting less structured. Even the military is much more flexible than it used to be.” – so we can tolerant less structured documentation.

Questions answered by good books: What’s the range of problems that this tech solves? How do different parts interact and alter each other’s behaviour? What are the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions”? What am I responsible for once I adopt the technology?

A step toward the solution: Safari. (Just sketching this out, not talking about Safari) – subscription service, profitable, there’s a competitor called SourceBeat which looks interestd.

Stuff that’s wrong with Safari (fun seeing this from an O’Reilly guy). Material is essentially identical to print books. There’s a nice Eclipse plugin, ORA should open source it. Lots of work to do, lots of potential. Other publishers should join Safari, or start their own service to push us to do more from it.

Comments: people saying the thing they really want is Safari offline. Everybody agrees it’s tough because of warez. Andy Oram: “Yeah, but people rip us off all the time! Will it make it worse?”.

Potential future roles for publishers: Authors may contract out to publishers for particular tasks: editing, layout,, art, indexing, tech review. Publishers might help with publicity, getting book reviews.

Improving user education: I am trying to apply what I know about good documentation to USENET, mailing lists, Linux Doc project, etc.

1. Urge active community participants to become formal contributors. O’Reilly often finds people on mailing lists, and pluck them out. Project folk should do this more – find out what motivates them, offer rewards, Wiki concept is intriguing but too new to judge effectiveness. (Comments from audience: Wikipedia good indication they will do well. Wikis tend to sprawl to cover everything. Yeah, but some pages become hotspots. Plone guy: We’re moving away from wiki for documentation, because the amount of refactoring increases exponential, so we’re moving to a more structured HOWTO system, with named authors, ownership etc. Andy Oram: Wiki is a good place to collect information, then someone goes through and pull out the info. Audience seems to agree.

2. Incorporate professionals into community documentation: problem is these professionals cost. Whittle down what is needed to the point where authors can afford professional help — just tiny discrete tasks. Or what about sponsorship? Companies must love decent documentation, right? Audience: companies don’t even give money to their own documentation. Perl’s good documentation was written while the authors were writing O’Reilly books, so there’s a weird kind of sponsorship here.

3. Nurture new users; don’t repel them. Community has to take responsibility for each member’s learning. Dump “RTFM” from your ammunition bag. These may be people you need to hire in six months.

4. Point people to documents: many useful explanations are buried. Create flexible pathways through documentation. Make use of professional developed documentation. Large volumes of documents will be overwhelming.

Plone guy: we have an embarassment of documentation. So we’re structuring, and it might be useful for other projects.

Enhancing rating systems. Let readers rank documents. There are problems, but then there are problems with reputation in the real world. Willingness to tolerate bad advice varies with the subject matter. Documentation in Plone “ages” (the ratings go toward the mean over time).

Ancillary failings of user educations: it favours English-speakers. There are translations, but it’s hard to keep things in sync. Cultural differences aren’t respected: we expect people to ask questions, or stand being flamed. You shouldn’t have to give up your cultural background to learn information. Different learning styles not respected. There are gaps, and haphazard coverage.

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Welcome to another day on a bus tour of OSCON, seated at the back uncomfortably close to the voices in my head. I’m currently in the Rumsey keynote, and I’m not writing notes about it, because you really have to sit and watch these maps and see what David Rumsey has done with it. Kidnap someone with a fast broadband connection, go to the David Rumsey Collection and click around like a mad thing. Note to self: we have to drag this speaker to the next NotCon. It’s the most inspiring thing I’ve seen in some time.

Okay, now it’s David Patrick who is CP at Novell.

Not going to talk much about Novell (boo!), but what’s going on in Open Source from the POV of business. (I’m pretty sure this is Patrick’s standard speech to businesses, which is usually a very bad sign, but it’s actually quite a good insight into what businesses are worried about with open source). David Patrick was CEO of XImian, working with Miguel. They put it together commercially five years ago. They went out to CEOs and IT people at Fortune 500 companies and pestered them with questions. Five years ago, very few people knew about open source. Now they do.

If you’re over 35, you probably know something about Novell. They’ve been around a long time. Novell bought Ximian, S.U.S.E.; we went from a proprietary company to an open source company. We’ve also started marketing. We’re not known for marketing. (“Freedom to choose Linux or any other software you damn well please” is the ad he has up on the screen.

Novell was a Windows shop. On March 31st of this year, they cancelled our Windows licenses. They’re no longer an active licensee. They say they’re their own case study. The steps are: moving to OpenOffice, then they’re moving to a Linux desktop. Two thousand out of six thousand have already moved. When Novell Desktop ships, the rest will be moved. They’ll be documenting all of this on the Web

The concern from companies is that there’s no money to be made out of open source. What you see is the evolution of new business models: MySQL good example. Licensing, maintenance, support, training is the usual business model. In open source, less emphasis on licensing, more emphasis on the other three. It’s a good fit with how the industry is changing. We’re becoming a more mature industry — less about finding new customers, more about looking after your existing clients.

We need to educate everyone – customers, businesses, and each other about the nature of free licenses. That’s very critical, he says.

What are the myths that we deal with when we talk to enterprise customers about open source.

Myth 1: Open source will destroy the software industry. Open source doesn’t spell the end of proprietary software.

Myth 2: “Open source isw a have for purple-mohawked hackers who write sub-standard code” – quote from CTO. Really, sixty percent are software professionals with >6 years of experience. And he says that I don’t care what colour hair they have. The code quality is really high.

Myth 3: Open source is a fad. Yeah, right.

Myth 4: Open source is “The Right Way” to develop software. It’s a great way, but it’s not the silver bullet. “Buddha wasn’t meditating on open source software”

Myth 5: There’s no money in open source. We’ve invested $260 million in Open Source. (Rather notably, didn’t actually explain how to make money. Just talked about how much has been invested in it. But you know…)

Myth 6: Open Source is free. Sure, downloading is free, but it’s not free to the enterprise.

How do you succeed? You need very precise focus. You need to understand complements and substitutes. Does open source complement what I’m doing? Substitute what I’m doing? Is there something out there that’s already doing what I need?

Now he’s talking about licenses. You can tell this is really his talk that he gives to businesses, but that’s not as bad as it might be. He’s saying how funny it was that the Ximian coders knew more about the subtleties of licensing than their corporate attorneys, and that knowledge needs to be spread.

Something that’s really helped is more universal computer literacy. Nice anecdote about his fifteen-year old daughter and how she hassled him every day over the problems she had with her Windows machine, so in the end he moved her to SUSE, and now she looks at him like he’s an idiot when he asks if its working okay.

The Internet was vital to open source. Most of the early Ximian engineers were hired off of IRC.

What else drove open source? Needs not being met by proprietary software. Especially the “one size fits all” idea – you have to change your company to fit our software. CEOs say they’re tired of being held hostage by the vendor.

Ton of money being invested in Linux – billions by IBM, Novell, RedHat.

Linux is a substitute to Windows. We have to make decisions constantly about whether we’re going to implement something like JBoss, or just use our engineers to improve JBoss.

We’re a cooler company since we adopted open source; we’re not ashamed any more. My kids aren’t embarassed to wear the t-shirts.

We think the desktop is very close to on par with Windows. We believe in the next generation will be on par, and we can beat Windows at a $50 price point.

How do companies move over? Look at complements or substitutes — do you add open source stuff, or replace proprietary stuff. What relationship do they want with vendors? Do you need 24/7 support? Or are you pretty self-contained? Tying oneself to open source solutions isn’t something he believes will happen. It’s going to be a long time before a customer can switch entirely to open source. Seeing it creep up the stack – low level, up to desktop, CRM. He doesn’t see anyone using a free software tax product evarrr.

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