How to reinvent the fucking wheel
Today I stumbled across this post by the iFixit makers. The interesting part can be found at the end of the post:
We are makers and we are fixers. Information on how to make, build, and fix things in the real world wants to be free. We want to help make that possible: this week, we’re making our publishing software, Dozuki, free for anyone to host open source, community-driven instruction manuals.
The site mentioned, "Dozuki" is actually not free, as can be read on the pricing page:
How does the free trial work?
Once your account representative has setup your site, you will have a 30 day Dozuki trial, completely free of charge. You won't be charged a cent if you cancel prior to the end of the free 30-day trial. After that, your plan will be billed once a month. It's easy to stop - or start - at any time.
So, I'm not sure, what they talk about in their post, but it's got nothing to do with opensource. But the thing, which annoys me is the fact, that they are reinventing the wheel for the thousandth time or so. Many others implemented opensource hosting platforms in the past. Of course for opensource software, not hardwar. But what's the difference? I don't see one from the philosophy perspective.
And why would one put their documentation to some remote site and not bundle it with the actual project? That's such a crappy idea. Nonsense. And then they babble about their proprietary format called the "Open Manual Format", which they describe as:
oManual is a simple, open XML-based standard for semantic, multimedia-rich procedural manuals.
Using XML to write a manual? You lose. No developer will do that. You write a README textfile. If you're oldschool you write a manpage. You maintain a webpage about the project where you describe it using HTML. Including images, videos, whatnot. You don't need such XML rubbish for this purpose.
From these things you can see, that many people of the so-called "open hardware movement" (or "makers" how they call themselfes often) don't have an opensource background. They never came in touch with opensource software. The don't know much about licensing (just take a look on the TOS on the Dozuki site). They just make the same errors as others of the opensource software community did before.
Sad.