FLOSSing is Good for Your Web Content
Free Libre Open Source Software makes the acronym FLOSS and it’s not the dental kind of floss that we’re talking about. Free also doesn’t mean no cost in this context – it means free as in freedom, which is how you get “Libre” for liberty – FOSS is known as FLOSS in Europe. With FLOSS and FOSS, you have the freedom to reuse the goods, knowledge, and content, share it in other places, or remix it as you see fit for your own purposes.
You may have heard the argument that open source doesn’t cost more in money but it can cost more in time because of the lack of support and documentation that often plagues open source software projects. Enter FLOSS Manuals, where the goal is to provide free manuals for free software. The documents produced in the FLOSS tool chain are written and read on a wiki web site, but also can be output as PDF files or as printed books.
FLOSS Manuals has created many inventive solutions for using wikis for documentation – not only can you get good print output from the system, but you can also use a Javascript-based API to embed chapters from a FLOSS Manuals book into any web page. A good example of this is the NGO (non-governmental organization) in a box website http://openpublishing.ngoinabox.org. FLOSS Manuals content is licensed under the Gnu Public License (GPL), so anyone can reuse the content.
The way in which FLOSS Manuals are written mirrors the way in which free open source software – itself is written: by a community who contribute to and maintain the content.
There are three main sections for the site:
Read – You can read all of the currently live and up to date manuals online or in PDF files. The manuals are organized on the page based on what you want to do with the open source software the manual documents.
Write – With a free login, you can click an Edit link at the top of any page of a manual in progress – and all the manuals are in progress at any given moment.
Remix – With only your login and your imagination, you can drag and drop chapters from any book on the FLOSS Manuals site to create another book of your own remixed design. Then, you can either create a PDF of the remix, with your own CSS 3.0 stylings, or create a set of code that you can copy and paste to embed it into another website. With the remix option, you can harness the power of participant- or community-created content on any other website.
I’ve used FLOSS Manuals extensively for One Laptop per Child documentation for kids, parents, and teachers using the XO laptop and Sugar operating system. We recently held a BookSprint in Austin, Texas, to create even more content to improve adoption rates and make the goal of the $100 laptop for children in developing nations supportable and attainable. Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals is constantly expanding and improving the usabilty of the system. At the BookSprint, It was as if we had the content management system vendor in the room with us, writing right along with us, and doing bug fixes and enhancement requests as we wrote!
FLOSS Manuals About page says, “By supporting quality, user-friendly documentation of Free, Libre, Open Source Software, FLOSS Manuals aims to encourage the use of this software, to support the technical and social revolution it enables.” I’m seeing a content change for the better.
