Alex Vincent wrote:
Lately the thought has been crossing my mind of creating a non-profit tax-deductible corp. specifically dedicated for churning out documentation for mozilla.org. I've worked out what I think is a viable business plan, but I'm going to need a little help.Alex,
I hate to rain on your parade, but I don't think this is going to work. Reading between the lines, you want ActiveState and Netscape to pay you to write documentation, and everyone else to donate you equipment and money (including the US Government), while no-one has any control over what you actually do. :-) Forgive me for suggesting that this is somewhat optimistic.
To be frank, the one thing I haven't seen come out of all the initiatives and defined process which you've spun up in this newsgroup and elsewhere is some actual documentation for Mozilla. (But it's perfectly possible that I haven't been paying enough attention when you've announced it.) If you had a strong track record of writing excellent docs, then Netscape might have hired you long ago, and given you some of what you want in your suggestion. After all, it happens to a lot of the hackers :-)
I don't want this post to seem discouraging, but I did say quite a while back that defining processes and procedures does not produce documentation, and it's quite sad to be proved right. The standard mozilla.org process is to reward those who show competence and commitment at a job with oversight over that people doing that job (called 'module ownership' in code), assuming that they want it, of course. So far in documentation, this has not happened.
I do want this post to be constructive, so here it is: job #1 should be to write documentation. If we start getting enough of it that process is needed, process will emerge. Let anyone who wants to help mozilla.org with docs (which is definitely something we need) be in no doubt: writing docs is the way to help :-)
Gerv
