Introduction and some project scope questions

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

First of all, I've been lurking on the list since it began (May 25) and I've
been meaning to post, but I haven't gotten around to it until now. 
So many things to do, so little time.

First of all (let me try this again), an introduction. I'm the project
leader of the Simple End-User Linux (SEUL) project, at www.seul.org. The end
goal of SEUL is to have a comprehensive suite of high-quality applications
(productivity applications as well as leisure/programming applications)
available under the GPL for the Linux platform, as well as a broader base of
educated users around the world who understand why free software is better. 
Note that we're not going to write these applications ourselves -- we are
attracting people who want to, and providing them with a framework where
they can work together, share ideas/users/members/publicity, etc.

We include a number of well-known projects (eg gFTP, WXftp, SoX) as well as
(many more :) little-known projects. For the most part, seul has been
low-profile lately because most of us are busy actually doing stuff.

First of all, the paragraphs that I know are kosher:

* If any of you are familiar with or interested in Electronic Design
Automation, the gEDA project is making great headway in producing a full
GPL'd suite of EDA tools to replace commercial ones. If you want to help
them out with documentation, they're struggling to find good people now so
they don't have to divert the programmers.
http://www.geda.seul.org/

* seul-edu (http://www.seul.org/edu/) is a group working on collecting 
educational tools and resources, and filling in the gaps where no free
tools yet exist. The software under 'existing software' could in most
cases use some actual documentation, and the software under 'current
projects' is in various states of completion, but could certainly also
benefit from more docs.

There are a dozen other projects (visible from http://www.seul.org/ in
the lower left corner) which might benefit from some doc help. I've
cc'ed this mail to seul-leaders in case any of them wants to follow this
mail up with a more detailed one.

But now to the more controversial topic -- is this group limited only
to documentation for programming projects, or are we also working on
advocacy documents and more independent documentation/techwriting efforts?
For instance,

* We have a 'Why Linux?' article that is linked #2 from linux.org's advocacy
documents page and generates perhaps a thousand hits a day, but it hasn't
been updated for over a year. 
http://www.seul.org/docs/whylinux.html

* We have a 'Commercial Port Advocacy Howto' document -- a guide for those
looking to convince a company to port their software to Linux.
http://www.seul.org/pub/howto/cpah.html

* I've written up a draft of an essay called 'Free Software Is Better',
describing the ideas behind free software, and describing many of the
arguments that companies and programmers consider when choosing whether
to free their software.
http://www.seul.org/pub/fsib.html

We'd love to have somebody take any of these documents and turn them into
something better. It would have to be a relatively self-motivated project,
since if we had the time to do much we'd already be done.
And I'm confident that there are many other projects out there each with
a handful of good documents that could use some improvement, integration,
evaluation, and sorting.
(I posted a proposal to collect and sort advocacy documents in various
categories, but I haven't had time to act on it --
http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/pub/Dec-1998/msg00052.html
It's certainly still a viable goal if anybody thinks it would be useful.)

In any case, I just wanted to say that there are also a number of
non-technical projects out there that are still generating useful materials.
I haven't gotten a good sense for the intended scope of this project yet.

Feel free to forward this wherever you think it's appropriate.
Thanks,
--Roger

===
SEUL-Leaders list, seul-leaders-request@seul.org
===