[coreboot] wiki backup

[Martin Roth]

I feel like we've discussed this a number of times, but maybe it
hasn't happened completely in open forums where everyone involved can
see it.  If that's the case, I apologize.

This isn't really a decision that can just be voted upon and if enough
people want to keep the wiki, the direction would change.  This isn't
an arbitrary decision on the part of the coreboot leadership, but
something that's been a very long time coming, with a number of
reasons.

* When the wiki was started, we didn't really think about licensing,
so most of what's been written needs to be scrapped as we're not going
to go back and contact all of the original authors, many of whom are
no longer part of the project, to see if it's OK to update the license
on their contribution.  As we've joined the SFC and committed to
having all of our documentation correctly licensed with an appropriate
license, this means that we'd be starting over, regardless of whether
we stuck with a wiki or changed to something else.

* The wiki requires a separate login from everything else, which has
to be created manually.  We've gotten criticism for only allowing wiki
access to "a few coreboot elites".  People can sign up for a gerrit
account and contribute to the coreboot documentation with pretty
minimal restrictions.

* The wiki has no integrated method of getting feedback or reviews
from people, so documentation written can be, and has been, wrong for
a long time before anyone noticed.  Moving to gerrit at least
guarantees that two people will look at what's added before it's
integrated.

* Moving the wiki into git puts the documentation where the source
code is, so it's more likely to get updated as the source code
changes.

* Most of the wiki is developer oriented, not user oriented, so again,
having that documentation alongside the source tree makes sense.

Currently the coreboot admins are mostly focused on development, and
while that may be an issue, it's the way that the coreboot project has
evolved.  We've talked at conferences in the past about having a more
user-oriented site, but the decision has generally been that it's
something better handled externally.  If someone wants to invest the
time to start and run a coreboot or open-source firmware related site,
we can certainly evaluate adding a link to it from the coreboot.org
page.  We've got links to various sites already on the "End Users"
page (https://coreboot.org/users.html).  The website itself is also in
git, so feel free to submit appropriate changes.

Martin



On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 12:37 AM Taiidan at gmx.com <Taiidan at gmx.com> wrote:
>
> I do not like this...
>
> I update the wiki on a regular basis for the boards I use and I can't
> understand why another critical choice was made without input from the
> community?
>
> The new system has less features, doesn't look as good and does not
> feature the current articles.
>
> Policies like this make it very unfriendly to a new user and help ensure
> that either only expert firmware developers will be able to install
> coreboot themselves the average person will simply be forced to buy from
> a company that sells coreboot systems (of course none of them sell
> systems with real "free firmware")
>
> --
> coreboot mailing list: coreboot at coreboot.org
> https://mail.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot