Slackware Handbook

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Sunday 23 January 2005 11:13 am, Narayan Newton 
<narayannewton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We at MadPenguin.org are creating a website to recreate the FreeBSD
> handbook for the Slackware Linux distribution. The quality and
> completeness of
> the FreeBSD docs is unparalleled in Linux. We feel that a "Slackware
> Handbook" would be very useful to many people.
>
> We have a wiki-like setup that will ease the burden of
> administration and allow the community to moderate the content. What
> would also help is to be able to copy sections of the FreeBSD
> handbook that are the same on Slackware. It is our understanding that
> the FreeBSD documentation is under a BSD-like license that allows
> copying and modification if the copyright is retained.
>
> We would like to confirm this and ask for permission to use the
> material from the FreeBSD Documentation community, as many have
> worked very hard to make this what it is. License or no, it wouldn't
> be right in our view to copy sections without approval of the
> community.

I'm not part of the doc team and it looks like this is going to happen 
anyway, but thank you very much for doing this. I use Slackware when 
I'm not using FreeBSD, and the only thing I've found lacking in my 
favorite Linux distro was documentation (aside from the usual, man 
pages and so forth). Maybe I wouldn't have noticed if FreeBSD's 
Handbook weren't so good ;) Honestly, though, good documentation is an 
absolute godsend in the open source world, and it makes learning new 
software that much easier, especially an OS, and it becomes an 
invaluable reference for anyone who uses it. This would be a great 
benefit to both parties, as many people have said. As you've said, 
you've picked the best possible *nix doc base, which is fantastic. I'm 
very much looking forward to this, and will try to help as time allows.

- jt