Do you agree that the leading open source projects would achieve broader success more quickly if more effort were spent on good introductory documentation? Tell us in the opensource.general discussion group.
Doing a better job at documentation can turn technical excellence into universal acceptance.
by Jack Herrington
April 15, 2003
pen source software has been extremely successful at the technology level. Apache, Mozilla, Linux, Perl, Python—the list of stable and robust open source software is impressive and growing. So why is open source still considered fringe?
Let's start with the poor discoverability of open source tools. How do you find the right tool for the job? More importantly, if you stumbled across the right tool would you be able to recognize it based on the information on the Web site? Take a random project on Sourceforge: Is it easy to recognize what the project does? Where it is going? What problem it was meant to solve?
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pen source software has been extremely successful at the technology level. Apache, Mozilla, Linux, Perl, Python—the list of stable and robust open source software is impressive and growing. So why is open source still considered fringe?
