ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Phil Bull <philbull@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi guys,

I've read through some of the Ubuntu Manual, and I must say it's looking
very polished. You've done some really good work and I admire the energy
that you've put into the project. I have a few issues with it, though.

The first is the lack of proper attribution. Sections of the manual are
clearly lifted from the Ubuntu system documentation (CC-BY-SA 2.5
licensed) and the Community wiki (CC-BY-SA 3.0), but since this is a
separate work, you need to provide a clear attribution to "Members of
the Ubuntu Documentation Project" and "Contributors to the Ubuntu
Community Documentation". There is also a restriction on CC-BY-SA 2.5
that all derivative works must be released under the same license, but
I'm not sure if the Manual would count as a derivative.

For an example of unattributed re-use, see "Does my scanner work with
Ubuntu?", around page 113, and compare it with the "Does my scanner work
with Ubuntu?" section of the system docs (Printing, faxing and scanning
-> Scanning).

The second is: Did you really have to fork so much of the existing
documentation? Perfectly good documentation exists for almost everything
in the manual: We have lots of stuff on Software Management, Security,
the Desktop, working with common apps etc., plus a Command Line guide,
within the currently shipping Ubuntu System Documentation (System ->
Help and Support). It's all available online too, and we've been able to
produce a single-document PDF from it before, albeit not a very
attractive one.

Wouldn't it have been more constructive to work on improving the
existing material and making it more visible to users and easier to
single-source into a combined document, than to re-do everything from
scratch? We're now left in a position where there are two extremely
similar community-maintained sets of documentation which differ just
enough to make it necessary to maintain them separately. The community
now has double the maintenance burden and double the translation burden,
and I really think it was reckless to implement this project in the way
that you did.

In effect, you've created a competitor to the official system docs. I
think that this will only serve to confuse users, who already have to
contend with a fragmented Ubuntu "help ecosystem" as it is (system docs,
wiki, third-party websites, IRC, mailing lists, LP Answers, etc.).

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull