When I was a wet-behind-the-ears Unix user and programmer, the go-to response to any tech question was RTFM, which stands for "Read the F... Fine Manual." Unfortunately, this hasn't changed for the Linux and open-source software generations. It's high time we addressed this issue and brought about positive change. The manuals and almost all the documentation are often outdated, sometimes nearly impossible to read, and sometimes, they don't even exist.
Indeed, Alejandro Colomar, who's been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last four years, has just quit. Why? It's simple, Colomar explained, "I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all... I cannot sustain this work economically anymore." Who can blame him?
As Corbet pointed out, "I have often complained that, even though thousands of developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel, there is not a single person whose job it is to write documentation for the kernel." It's not that no one writes documentation. Corbet continued, "There are plenty of developers who write documentation, don't get me wrong; some of them work quite hard at it. But that is usually not what their employers are paying them to do."
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