It's been a while since we here at OStatic checked in on FLOSS Manuals, an ambitious effort to produce free, online documentation for open source software. Here are some of the details on what's new there.

...there’s apparently some concern over Gutsy Gibbon’s documentation. Gibbon is the latest release of Ubuntu, version 7.10, which came out last month to the usual fanfare associated with new Ubuntu releases...

If you ask what's missing from open source software, one of the top responses is often "documentation." While there's piles and piles of great code stuffed up on Google Code, SourceForge.net, and others, the actual documentation to accompany it is often lacking.

"Hey everybody. Now that Miro has reached the big 1.0, we need to make the documentation better for our users. That’s why I’m asking everybody to please, take a look at the documentation at http://getmiro.com/documentation and lend us a hand..."

Some entertaining lguest documentation discussed in an earlier story was merged into the mainline kernel with the commit message, "the netfilter code had very good documentation: the Netfilter Hacking HOWTO. Noone ever read it. So this time I'm trying something different, using a bit of Knuthiness."

Board and chipmaker Via is gearing up toward releasing Linux driver source code and product documentation for its popular x86-compatible chipsets and peripherals. The company has launched a website where Ubuntu 8.04 and SUSE 10 binary graphics drivers can be downloaded, with source code and documentation to follow, it says.

I love the Ubuntu Wiki, and I think the Official Ubuntu Documentation is great! These are two important reasons why Ubuntu has been such a successful Linux distribution.

How the documentation is important to the GNU/Linux world? Why we need a documentation? Basically this is crucial point for any project. The documentation is something like a gate to the project, new users go through that gate to enter in the project and if that gate is broken the user could go in the wrong direction.

The Internet and Google have made FOSS developers lazy because they have made it too easy to abdicate the job of proper documentation to "The community." Telling users and potential contributors to use Google, mailing lists, and forums is not documentation. It's a way to guarantee having fewer users, unhappy users, and fewer contributors.