Free Software needs Free Documentation

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 24.03.2011 16:22, schrieb Don:
> spir wrote:
>> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html
>>
>> I think this applies directly to D2.
>>
>> Note: this post is no offence to Andrei's great work. Just a report we
>> /also/ need a free/copyleft D2 manual; or that TDPL's content becomes
>> free in a short while. Even more since TDPL was kind of a premature
>> publication, describing not-yet-implemented, even less validated,
>> features. Online addenda / corrections / rewritings cannot fill the gap.
>> Unfortunately, our society's culture is such that people will rarely
>> *buy* a free-like-in-freedom book to thank authors and allow them
>> going on working for the community. This nearly forces people who wish
>> to get something back from their (usually huge) work to publish in a
>> proprietary way; for software, even more PLs, making frozen manuals
>> for live tools, and making improvements impossible.
>>
>> Denis
>
> I would say that what we really need is tutorials, rather than a
> refernce work. Most urgently we need to make sure that the existing
> tutorials that contain errors or refer to obsolete/removed features, get
> pulled down.

I agree. Even though D1 tutorials should be left as they are, maybe with 
a remark that they're D1 specific.

Some tutorials with examples, including basic ones that introduce the 
language, would really be helpful for anyone who wants to start using D 
without buying the book. These should be linked on the official D homepage.
After getting started with D it's not too hard to learn more specific 
stuff from the existing D documentation (Phobos documentation and the 
language specification). Of course Tutorials explaining these topics 
would still be useful, because you don't always know where to look for a 
specific feature.

I don't think something like TDPL needs to be available for free. Some 
tutorials and the existing documentation should be sufficient (For 
example "The C Programming Language" or "The C++ Programming Language" 
aren't available for free, either).

Cheers,
- Daniel