Linux @lemmy.ml petsoi @discuss.tchncs.de 2 mo. ago

Man pages maintenance suspended

lwn.net Linux man-pages project maintenance [LWN.net]

From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>

Hi all,

As you know, I've been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I'd welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.

Have a lovely day! Alex

77 comments

https://xkcd.com/2347/
This sounds like the sort of infrastructure project the Linux Foundation should be supporting.
- They only invest in the fancy marketable new age shit, and well, corporate rejects (Tizen, MeeGo, etc)
In my opinion it's criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.
- Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it's not perfect, it's one of the better uses of my tax euros.
  
  Didn't they suspend, or greatly hinder, that recently?
- That's why the current state of open source licenses doesn't work. Commercial use should be forbidden for free users. You could dual license the work, with a single, main license applying to everyone, and a second addendum license that just contains the clause for that specific use, be it personal or corporate. Corporate use of any kind requires supporting the project financially.
  
  I'm a single dude who sells custom electronics with open source software on them. I sell maybe two PCBs a month. It just about covers my hobby, I'm not even living off of it. I can't afford commercial licenses. There has to be tiers.
  
  In return, I've made every schematic, gerber file, and bill of material to my stuff freely available.
  
  I hope we see an evolution of licensing. Giant companies shouldn't get a free pass if they're just going to treat the original devs like a commodity to be used up.
  
  I agree, but this is mostly an issue with permissive licenses like MIT. GPL and its variants have enough teeth in them to deal with shit like this. I'm scared of the rising popularity of these permissive licenses. A lot of indie devs have somehow been convinced by corpos that they should avoid the GPL and go with MIT and alike
- Definitely agree, maybe it’s time to share Paul Ramsey’s talk on the subject again
  
  Bruce Perens is currently working on a new licensing model called Post Open requiring that business with sufficient revenue to pay up.
  
  https://postopen.org/
- It's criminal to let someone do the thing he actively volunteers to do? It's criminal to use software that someone intentionally puts out into the world as free?
  
  If you're willing yo do something for free, people are going to let you 🤷‍♂️
  
  It's criminal the propaganda that lead people like this developer to believe they should do the work for free, and not worry, because the corporate world always gives back :)
Just, um, don't invite that guy who helped out with the xz tools...
Everything needs to be slapped with the AGPL. Fuck corporate America
- AGPL on documentation? What would that do?
- Creative Commons-BY-NC would be better.
  
  Alright we should use that then
- AGPL doesn't help. AGPL authors are explicitly pro-corporate use
  
  I thought AGPL was the more restrictive version of GPL? Which license should we use so that corporates need to pay?
My old employer used to have people on staff just for technical writing. Some of that writing became the man pages you know, and some of it was 'just' documentation for commercial products - ID management and the like.

Then we sued IBM for breach of contract, and if you ask anyone about it they'll parrot the IBM PR themes exactly, as their PR work was brutal. People in Usenet and Forums were very mean, and the company decided to stop offering much of the stuff that it was for free. It was very 'f this'.

If man pages needed a volunteer to maintain, I know why ours tapered off.
Things like this make me wish I was a tech CEO. I'd totally be the guy ensuring we give back to projects if I was.
- That is part of why you're not a tech CEO. You're not supposed to have compassion! No investor would want that.
  
  P.S. This is an attack on CEOs and investors, not on you :)
- Nah, the investors don't see it as a benefit to your growth to pay people you don't have to
  
  10k for a company making millions annually is nothing, 1% or less. But split between some of these projects, especially the less appreciated or funded ones, can be life changing.
  
  But you're unfortunately right
- Unfortunately, people like this don't become CEOs.
- is this sarcasm?
My company will let me purchase software, but it won't let me donate to FOSS. Budgeting says it's "unnecessary". So screwed up. (A tiny amount money on my end, but still, it would be nice to help out a little.)
I think its this site? https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/

I don't see any option to give money. So he does not accept donations from users like you and me and only asks for sponsorship?

An alternate website can be found here: https://linux.die.net/man/ However, I don't know how much they differ.

Edit: What I don't like with both of these sites is, that they are powered by Google. I would like to see an alternative engine, at least an option to set it up. That's probably a reason why I never used it and actually wouldn't want to support it.
- You do realize that man pages don't live on the internet? The kernel.org one is the offical project website, as far as I know, but the project itself is very much not for the web presense, but for the vastly useful documentation included on your distribution.
  
  The few times I've needed to man [app name] on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I've always been able to find what I need in the included docs
  
  I hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don't think you need until --help doesn't cut it
  
  You do realize that man pages don’t live on the internet?
  
  What part of my reply is this an answer to? I know we have our man pages offline. But the website here is online and they use Google as a search machine. My critique is using Google and not providing an alternative search machine setup.
  
  It's still useful though because you might hit it from a search engine while searching other stuff and you can also provide links to it when answering questions for people.
He absolutely deserves it.
Quick, print them all out now before they're gone!
Ahaha! It is already bad!

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