Free Licenses - Come and Get 'Em

GNOME is Free, which means that the software is under the GPL or LGPL and the documentation is under the FSF's GNU Free Documentation License. Eric Baudais has been working hard to mark up these various licenses in DocBook. If you would like to include these licenses as appendices to your documents, you can grab them out of CVS at gnome-docu/gdp/fdl.sgml and gnome-docu/gdp/gpl.sgml.

Using these licenses

To use the FDL, you must include a copy of it in the package. Further, your documentation must link to a reliable source of the license which is part of the package(s). To suit these requirements, all packages which have FDL'd documents should include a copy of the FDL in a file called COPYING-DOCS. You can get this file out of CVS at gnome-docu/gdp/COPYING-DOCS. A copy of the FDL will be installed by gnome-core which GNOME applications can link to. This is not yet set up, but a link to "gnome-help:fdl" should work soon (look here for an example). If you have any documents which appear on the web, you should grab the file gnome-docu/gdp/fdl.sgml from CVS and include it as an entity to create an appendix containing the FDL which you can refer to.

New GDP Writers

We have had quite a few new people join the GDP in the last couple months. I thought I should introduce them so that everybody can welcome them when they see them on IRC or the mailing lists. New contributors (shown with their project) include: Liam Hazell (GNOME Color picker), Jeff Waugh (Sawfish Capplet), Ian Miller (Free Cell), Tim Riehle (GNOME Mines), Gilles Robitaille (GNOME Stock Ticker), Michael Koziarski (GNOME Xbill), Emese Kovacs (Glines), Erik Jarvi (gtcd, other gnome-media), John Gilger (GNOME Manual of Style), Pat Costello (GNOME Manual of Style), Michael McElree (GNOME Manual of Style, Sawfish), Rob Bradford (GNOME-Stones). (If I forgot anybody, please email me and I'll include you next time.)

GDP Getting Some Style

The GDP has always been one of the coolest parts of GNOME, but now it is getting style too. One of the offspring of a long but interesting discussion on whether we should change the name from "GNOME" to "Gnome" was the idea that the GDP needs a style guide. This has been discussed and even partially started in the past, but now it is really happening. Plus, it is being developed by a combination of hard-core GDPers and professional style guide authors. The team developing The GNOME Manual of Style is: Pat Costello, John Fleck, John Gilger, Alexander Kirillov, and Michael McElree. As soon as they have a draft ready, we will discuss it on gnome-doc-list and make any necessary revisions before using it in the GDP.

Joining the GNOME Project released

Dan Mueth wrote up a short tutorial on Joining the GNOME Project. It aims to help people who want to join the GNOME project get started. It seems to be drawing attention to some areas of GNOME which have not been receiving much attention, such as desktop sounds.

GUI DocBook Editors

Just as everybody was crossing their fingers and saying their prayers for a GUI DocBook editor, a number of possible solutions have popped onto the scene. The one many of us are most familiar with is Conglomerate. This was a beautiful demonstration of how nicely a GUI DocBook editor could be. The concensus seems to be that Conglomerate is a very ambitious project and making it work properly would require a substantial amount of additional coding. There is currently some private discussion between a couple GNOME and KDE hackers to try to do a joint effort to build on this. There are obvious complications to making a joint effort here, but it would be great if we could work this out.

What I think many of us were surprised by were some newcommers to the DocBook editing scene. First, Lyx has recently acquired the ability to export DocBook/SGML and even ships with a DocBook template. It does not import DocBook/SGML yet, but it is rumoured this is in the works. There is also a GNOME port of Lyx in progress, which would make this an even more attractive solution.

Abiword has also recently obtained DocBook exporting support. Later the same day it acquired DocBook importing support. Boy - you have to love these Abiword guys. I haven't tried it out yet, but it looks like Abiword will win the prize for the first viable DocBook editing tool under GNOME. Send them an email and show your support.

General User Docs (gnome-user-docs)

GNOME 1.4 will have a new package called gnome-user-docs which will contain general user documents. Alexander Kirillov is coordinating this package and has been doing a lot of the writing so far. It currently has a glossary, Introduction to Gnome, and If you are new to Linux/UNIX. If you have any feedback on these documents, please send them to Alexander or else to docs@gnome.org for general discussion.

General

We need people to work on the following:

1. Fix doc bugs remaining from GNOME 1.2 release. (Documentation bug list in HTML format)

2. Test Nautilus-based help system. Please send all bug reports to Eazel's Bugzilla server. (Note: This involves building Nautilus out of CVS.) (Contact: Ali Abdin)

3. Improve subject tree for a Contents list which includes all types of documentation on a system.

4. Coordinate an update of the developer documention in the architecture section of the developer web pages. This information should also be placed into a stand-alone DocBook document which we can distribute under the FDL. (Contact Dan Mueth for more information.)

Developer

We need developers to work on the following:

1. Update GNOME technology descriptions in the Architecture and Design part of the developer web pages.

2. Write API docs. (High priority)

3. Write/maintain developer tutorials and white papers.

Higher-priority Documents

We need document authors to work on the following documents:

1. GNOME Icon Edit manual.

2. Manuals for any games in gnome-games which lack them. (See the DocTable for a complete list.)

3. GHex manual.

4. Help docs for internal GNOME widgets (file picker, font picker, color selector, print preview, etc.).