Linux Journal Offers Artistic Immortality

In order to make it easier for users to
evaluate and learn to use free software available on the Internet,
Linux Journal will be changing our author
contract to encourage authors to contribute articles to free
software or free documentation projects after they have been
published in Linux Journal.Contributors already are taking advantage of the policy,
which promises to help people browsing the Web for new free
software to try. It will also keep documentation up to date. The
option of contributing articles to free projects has been available
to Linux Journal authors since its founding.
It is now being added to the author contract to make it clear to
all authors that the option is open to them.Linux USB maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who wrote a
Linux Journal article on USB device drivers
that was recently accepted into the Linux kernel source tree, said
he is happy with the new policy. "It will allow projects to offer
professional grade documentation directly with their software,
making it easier for users to have access to it", he said.
Kroah-Hartman recently began writing a new column on device drivers
for Linux Journal, and he said plans to submit
the columns as well. The USB
article originally appeared in the October 2001 issue, and
it is in the kernel as of version 2.5.3-pre6.Keeping articles in software distribution channels will help
keep them up to date, as people who modify the code can check and
fix the relevant documentation at the same time. "If the software
changes, the documentation must be updated to reflect these
changes", Kroah-Hartman added. "This ensures that anyone who picks
up the software package for the first time reads the correct
information. If any user realizes that what they have read is
different from what the software really does, they will instantly
start to doubt all of the documentation."Nick Moffitt, who wrote the
GAR software build
system and the article
"GAR:
Automating Entire OS Builds", said that it is important to
modify the bundled version of the article to match new
functionality in the software. He writes:Some major features of GAR have changed since I
wrote the article from the May/June issue of Embedded
Linux Journal. The GAR system now separates the notion
of the compilation install directory (such as
/home/rms/new_file_tree/) and the prefix (such as /usr or /).
Because our software needs to know it has to look in /etc for
config files when it runs, rather than /home/nick/build/etc/, this
was extremely important.
But this also means that users and developers need to keep
track of a new variable: $(DESTDIR). This single change has made a
little more work for package maintainers, but it has improved the
system's usefulness significantly. If the documentation were fixed
in the pre-DESTDIR days, it could be devastatingly confusing and
misleading to the user.The only options in such a world would be to rewrite the
documentation from scratch (a difficult task, especially if one
needed to make the new documentation seem as different as possible
from the original), ignore the documentation altogether (misleading
the user) or abandon the project.So much documentation is out of date these days, why bother
deliberately creating this sorry state of affairs?And, in answer to the question, "How will this help
Artists?", Moffitt says:"One of the reasons to produce Art is to ensure a
sort of immortality. By allowing one's work to be kept relevant,
this can be achieved. Richard Stallman hasn't written much code in
gcc or gdb in a while, yet his contributions toward them would have
been forgotten if he had not let others take the reins and keep
them up to date. Per Cederqvist hasn't written much of the CVS
documentation in years, yet it's still called "The Cederqvist
Document".
"The ability to modify works provides a rich palette from
which to construct new Art."Don Marti is editor in chief
of Linux Journal.

email: dmarti@ssc.com