OSDDP: Involving Students With Open Source Docs

cel4145 writes "The Professional Writing Program at Purdue University recently began the Open Source Development and Documentation Project (OSDDP) where students and instructors across multiple sections of business and technical writing are producing documentation for and about open source applications (see the press release or a mirror). The community and project are modeled after the open source development model and based on service learning principles. For example, students are already working on end user documentation and case study analysis for Drupal and market research and analysis for OpenOffice. Completed texts will be published using a Creative Commons license."

Comments

License

[Pan T. Hose]

Does anyone know why the Creative Commons license was used instead if the GNU Free Documentation License? Are those licenses compatible? For example, would it be possible to made that work available on Wikibooks and parts of that documentation incorporated into relevant Wikipedia articles? I hope so, becuase it is going to be a magnificent project and Wikipedia is a central respository of free knowledge today.

Re:License

[TAGmclaren]

Because Lawrence Lessig is cool Stanford Professor that argued in front of the Supreme Court about copyright extensions, and Richard Stallman is hippy-looking MIT drop-out that argues with geeks about Linux really being GNU/Linux? :)

Related to topic (and more related to my field of study) is the question of journal articles. Most journals are contributed to by academics, and the academics don't get paid to write in the journals. However, the journals are copyrighted to the teeth, and for an academic/researcher/scientist trying to get access to the journals you have to pay.

That seems like quite an outdated method to me, but it hangs on because of the prestige associated with the older journals (MISQ is a big one in Information Systems). I hope to soon see some prestigious journals coming along with something like a creative commons license, or even better (though much less likely for financial reasons), a big journal swapping all their content over to creative commons.

It just seems ludicrous that these publishers, who no longer serve a purpose, get paid as the gatekeepers to knowledge in so many fields when it would otherwise be free. Most of the Editors of the Journals are luminaries that get paid nothing, and the contributors to the field get paid nothing as well. With web access meaning you can hit a huge audience virtually instantly at a low cost, why not free the information?

Re:License

[metlin]

Actually that is not necessarily always true lately.

For instance, these days submissions in Physics happen by people writing a paper, and uploading it to arXiv -- where it gets peer reviewed and you get inputs. And more importantly, you establish in public that you were the first person to come up with FOO.

Not only that, the process is a lot more open than it used to be. Although some J Random dude at Physical Review can (and will) reject your paper for unknown reasons, it's quite unlikely that would happen if it has received excellent reviews after it's put up at arXiv. The process is a whole lot more transparent.

And since only the final editions go to the journals, the paper is still available at arXiv. And arXiv has been working on making several other publications available online - however, this has only begun for papers from and after 1992, so that is indeed a problem.

However, although arXiv does have a CS section, it's not frequented as much as the physics or mathematics sections. Which is a sad thing, IMHO.

And oh btw, in arXiv - the authors own the copyrights, so no question of the journal asking the arXiv to retract the papers. In fact, sometimes authors post their papers after acceptance for a journal publication.

Not too sure about conference publications, though.

Pros and Cons

[fembots]

I can see a couple of advantages such as independant, objective and professional documentation for Open Source.

On the other hand, I'm also concerned that these documentations might not be as in-depth as if they were written by the persons involved in these projects.

I mean, will we see a similar case like "The marketing department never understands what we IT is really doing!"?

Kinda different approach...

[Skudd]

From what I know of the open source world, documentation is one area that people make money on the free product.

Although, I suppose it does make sense, given the fact that what is published could most likely be printed, bound, and sold, just the same as any other documentation.

Re:License-Gatekeepers! Set my information free.

[_Sprocket_]

For all forms of knowledge there are gatekeepers. Even your beloved Internet has a gatekeeper know as an ISP.

My ISP is being a poor gatekeeper then. I can change service to another ISP. I can go to my local internet cafe. I can go the the library. I can wait until I go to work. In all cases, I can access the same information without my ISP either being aware of or having any say in that access.

Yes, lets hold up as a good example of what we'll get, The Internet. OK so you've just read something on the web. So how do you know it is correct?

Something gets printed in a Journal. How do you know it is correct? The same process of peer review and established trust can be done with the web. And, in fact, has been done for quite some time.

This is a GoodThing(TM)

[DLR]

The biggest weakness of OpenSource in general is the documentation. And while no one can argue that you can get more in depth documentation from the author of the software, most of that documentation is difficult to read at best, and so totally obscure that it would be easier to just read the source and figure out the app at worst. When the programmers write the docs they tend to take too much for granted. They'll tell you about the leaves on the trees and the patterns on the bark, but neglect to tell you what type of tree they're telling you about, so to speak. This is why most companies have a different team writing the docs than wrote the application.

Having said that, I'm very glad to see someone addressing the need for documentation on OpenSource software. If Joe User can grab a manual (even a virtual one) and read up on how to use (for example) Open Office he's far more likely to try to use it if the latest commercial offering is out of his budget. And if some members of Management happen to try reading some decent documentation on a given package they might be persuaded to run a "test copy" at work as well. This shortcoming (the lack of good docs) has probably been one of the larger stumbling blocks to the widespread adaptation of Open Source software by business, and this is a novel way to get some people to work on this area for free.

Involving students with open source code

[Diomidis Spinellis]

In my course Software Comprehension and Maintenance I ask students to contribute to an open-source project, by adding a new feature or fixing an important bug. The course's grade is entirely determined by their performance on this project.

The course is an elective, and was offered for the first time last year; not many students decided to take it. Those who did, got hooked; some commented that it was the course where they really understood what it meant to program.

The following projects were completed last year:

• Support for PDF actions in PDFBox.
• Improvements to the GUI interface of the ZGRViewer
• The addition of a new question type in the ETH Lecture Communicator

This year the course will be taught in English and will be offered to students across Europe through the EU's Erasmus student mobility programme. I hope to be able to report on new exciting results through slashdot next year.

OK, I’ll bite

[Pan T. Hose]

Because Lawrence Lessig is cool Stanford Professor that argued in front of the Supreme Court about copyright extensions, and Richard Stallman is hippy-looking MIT drop-out that argues with geeks about Linux really being GNU/Linux?

I know this is a trendy thing here to insult Richard Stallman, but please at least stick to facts. First of all, he is not an "MIT drop-out." Back in 1971, as an 18 years old freshman at Harvard University he was hired by MIT as a hacker in the AI Lab. If working as a teenager in The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early '70s is not "cool" than I seriously don't know what is.

Second of all, it is slightly more complicated than "Linux really being GNU/Linux." You might want to read the GNU/Linux naming controversy article on Wikipedia for a good start. Do you remember the Seattle Times interview with Linus Torvalds which was posted here just a week ago? This is the first sentence of the opening paragraph: "Linus Torvalds [pronounced LEE-nus] started a revolution of sorts in the computer industry when he created the Linux operating system and decided to share it with fellow programmers on the Internet."

The problem is that Torvalds didn't start any revolution in 1991. The revolution had already been happening becuase that very operating system had been being written since Linus was 14 years old. Eight years later he wrote the final piece, the kernel, and finally made GNU usable.

This was a great achievemnt. But the fact that taking an 8 years old project and renaming it after one's name can often start flame wars should not be surprising to anyone. Do you remember the recent outrage with CherryOS and PearPC? There are a lot of strong emotions involved where one puts many years of hard work into a project. But that is even not the most important thing here.

It is not important whose name is on the project. It is not important who started it, but it is very important why. The GNU project was started because of some ideals. Those very ideals made it possible. And those ideals made it needed in the first place. When people read such intervies and get the impression that Torvalds wrote the entire operating system starting a revolution and don't even know that GNU has ever existed, they read "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" Torvald's autobiography and get the impression that it is all about fun. Meanwhile, the real revolution has started because of freedom and nothing else.

And this revolution was not about starting something new, but rather saving something old.

I strongly urge you to read Free as in Freedom written by Sam Williams to know how, when and why the revolution was started. The entire book is released under the GNU Free Documentation License and is available on-line.

Stallman, an MIT hacker in the 1970s, wanted a source code for his printer drivers to fix them. A fellow programmer refused to give it to him because of an NDA. It outraged Stallman who considered it a personal insult and who repeatedly refused to get software which was offered to him for free but with an NDA, alienating himself and making his life as a programmer much harder, because at the end he was pretty much the only person in the AI Lab with no access to all of the proprietary software there.

There are strong emotions involved. There are ideals, fight for freedom at the cost of personal sacrifices. It is not "just for fun." Richard Stallman was not an "MIT drop-out." He r

and I'll bite back

[TAGmclaren]

You assume I know nothing about the whole controversy, when in fact I do. I've met RMS, I've heard him speak about what drives him.

The quip at the start was meant to be humour. You asked why they're using creative commons - I said because RMS is a hippy-looking MIT drop-out (using the second definition of the word), which is all true.

Now, without wanting to disturb you up there on your soap box, what matters when picking sides over this for most people isn't reality. It's perception. Laurence Lessig is the foremost authority on electronic IP right now, known widely amongst the community for his ideals. RMS is known mostly only within the IT fraternity, and even then people think of him as some smelly monk whose interesting but for the most part to be avoided.

So, assume you're a Joe Blow (no law degree or PhD, as you quite proudly boast) and you have to pick a license. Do you:
a) pick the guy who has stood up in front of the supreme court fighting for the prevention of copyright extensions, and who developed the licence that The Beastie Boys have released work under; or
b) pick the guy that quit MIT, is in serious need of a haircut/shave and who gets up on his soapbox regularly about it should be GNU/Linux, not just Linux?

Doesn't matter about whose right or whose wrong. It's just how it's perceived. I admire RMS, I think the world needs people like him, but I think that what he's proposing is flawed. I think that Linus's philosophy is much more realistic than RMS's semi-communist approach, and in trying to create freedom for the users he denies freedom for the developers - the people whose software it is.

Regardless, the original quip was meant humourously (note the smiley). So just relax a bit, ok? :)