Marcelo Toledo

Forgetting the fact that rms can be a complicated person, I admire him for various reasons, he was capable of bringing together with his ideas, a revolution. It was impossible to measure what his actions was capable of back then, but even though he worked hard to achieve his objectives.

He acted small, starting with one step, but thinking big, knew he needed many parts to create a completely free operating system, a text editor, compiler, shell, documentation tool, kernel and much more. Creating all of this would take a bunch of time and people to help, that’s where documentation became an important chapter.

Texinfo was created to markup your text and produce beautiful documentation in many different formats, one source, multiple outputs. If you check successful applications in the GNU operating system you’ll see that it normally has a very complete documentation, I would definitely give some points to Texinfo for the success of GNU.

Now leaving the open source business, another case that is shining is Apple, lately I’ve been reading a lot about Objective-C and Cocoa, therefore I’ve been seeing a lot Apple website and it’s development tools. My entire background is in UNIX and the only time I touched Objective-C was with GNUstep, and I say, Apple website and tools concentrate plenty of information and they are doing a great job in the documentation field.

When I see things like this, I understand more and more their huge success, so if you have a project where you need to teach people, evangelize, think very well about documentation and use these two successful cases as reference.