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> If so, does any of that user assistance significantly differ from the
> types of user assistance available for software on Windows?
I think so.
One obvious difference is the licensing. Documentation is often under as
open a license as the product it supports. Another is the choice of tools,
with a strong bias toward using open source tools.
Partly because of those differences, there's a strong tendency toward
single-sourcing, often via DocBook (www.docbook.org) XML in the open
source world. I'm inclined to think we'ere further down that road than
the proprietary-source folks, but this may be either wishful thinking
or plain ignorance on my part.
(Not sure if this one is just me, or general...)
A subtle but, I think, important difference comes from the Unix tradition
behind much of the open source. When I learned Unix in 1982, it was well
established that documentation must be:
available online
printable by the user
extensively cross-referenced
This was maintained through the GNU info stuff, and into various more
recent efforts. It just wouldn't occur to many of us to implement a
help system with a bunch of unprintable text, at least not for anything
more complex than one-liners describing fields of a form.
A related point (honoured in the breach as well as the observance) is
an emphasis on complete documentation. What do you mean you're going to
ship a word processor without a description of the file format it uses?
Are you out of your mind?
Methinks there's more tendency to rely on mailing lists, rather than
one-on-one help, for technical support. Our project, for example, has
a paid user support person, but she does that via the list.
Also, for some types of question we can just say "Use the source, Luke."
This includes both the more esoteric questions about our implementation,
where we suggest reading the source, and the feature requests we don't
like. The user has the source and can build those himself if he really
needs them.
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