Re: Giveaway LDP CD

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>]

I agree with Greg; these should be pure give-aways; the cost of
administering the money would exceed the cost of the CDs and shipping.

These should also simply be a snapshot of the collection, perhaps with
HTML, ASCII and PDF formats to make it as open and flexible as
possible.  That way, it can be read with a browser, scanned with grep
or printed nicely for classroom/office distribution.  (Does PDF allow
for A4 vs Letter differences?) 

We should not be intending these as an adjunct to any distro ---
whether or not people can copy them into /usr/doc is not relevant.
Think of it as just a hardcopy of an LDP mirror site. If SuSE or RH or
whoever wish to bundle the docs with their own package manager, they
are free to take the CD image, wrap some software around it, and
repackage it.

We should also only produce the minimum run; this may mean we must
create at least 200 at a shot --- if the CD is not absolutely current,
it is no great loss: Those few docs which have changed can be fetched
online --- being a few months out is no big deal for docs, just so
long as it is not years out of date.  I have seen the big distros
handing out old versions, and really, if ours are out of date by even
a few months, it is much less an issue than an old and possibly buggy
distro.

There is also a need for this CD in developing nations where bandwidth
is an issue.  For example, a CD which includes spanish and portuguese
docs might be very useful in more remote areas of South America.  I
know at least one site in Vietnam who would love to have Vietnamese
docs on a CD even if they are a little old; we have a similar need in
the new Linux training center in Cameroon.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@linux.ca>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723
TCI - Business Innovations through Open Source : http://www.teledyn.com
Canadian Co-ordinators for Bynari International : http://ca.bynari.net/
Free Internet for a Free O/S? - http://www.teledyn.com/products/FreeWWW/



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