Subject: Linux Bibles
From: [email-masked] (Matt Welsh)
To: Linux Documentation Project writers <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 11:25:19 -0500

I sent this to the folks at Yggdrasil and LSL regarding the Linux Bibles.

>From [email-masked] Wed Jan 11 21:34:14 1995
From:	[email-masked] (Matt Welsh)
Date:	Wed, 11 Jan 1995 21:33:51 -0500
To:	[email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
	[email-masked]
Subject: Linux Bible/Dr Linux

Adam et. al.,

Thanks for sending along the new edition of the Linux Bible. I got it in
the mail today.

You've done a good job, but unfortunately I have some questions about the 
organization of the book.

First of all, you have removed nearly all of the author and version 
information from each document, especially the HOWTOs. I don't think
that any of the HOWTOs have the version number or last modification date 
listed, and most of them don't even have the author's name (or even an email 
address) at the top. Stripping this information from each document is 
completely unnecessary and a VERY BAD IDEA. People need to know what version 
of a document they're reading, and they need to know who wrote it and the 
contact address for each author. Listing the author names on the first page
isn't good enough, especially when the e-mail addresses are missing.

You also stripped the title pages off of several of the LDP manuals, another 
unnecessary step which makes it difficult to determine who wrote each book.

For future editions, I'd like to ask that each document retain all author,
title, and version information as it is presented in the free versions 
available on the network. I'm not just picking nits here: This is an 
important aspect of the documents. If you need to reformat the titles, author 
names, e-mail addresses, version numbers, and modification dates, that's fine, 
but they should appear at the beginning of each document in an obvious 
fashion. Otherwise our lives become very difficult, and readers have no way 
of submitting meaningful feedback. 

Also, the erroneous copyright statement from the 1st Edition is
still present on the first page of the book: "This book may be copied under 
the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License..." Although I
believe this to apply to the book as an aggregate work, this is rather
misleading. Although you did reprint the full LDP license on the second 
page, giving the readers the initial impression that material in the book
could be copied under the GPL is quite confusing.

Thanks for you attention to these matters for the third printing of the book.
I'm glad that it's selling so well and that it is widely available; this is
a great help to us as, I'm sure, it is to you. But it would be nice for
the above items to be addressed for the next version, for obvious reasons.

Thanks much,
mdw