Ask HN: Review Our (StackExchange Based) FOSS Community Site

1 point

17 years ago

I can't speak for any of you, but I'm kind of tired of answering some of the same basic questions about Free and Open Source software over and over again. Newcomers are asking and certainly deserve answers to their questions both basic and profound, but too little is currently being done - in our view - to help us all out in answering these questions and preserving the answers. Unless you're happy w/ the current siloed maze of mailing lists and community forums.

Enter FOSS FAQ (http://www.fossfaq.com). As an unrepentant fan of Joel and Jeff's StackOverflow, I'd been thinking about trying to replicate some of the features to tackle the problem of FOSS questions and answers. Then they made StackExchange available as a SaaS application, saving me the trouble.

What we've done then is to spin up an instance of StackExchange aimed at the wonderful world of FOSS. I figure it they have one for Magic: The Gathering, open source software probably deserves it.

It's already been shown to a limited group of open source folks, and features contributions from names you might know like PostgreSQL's Josh Berkus, Eclipse's Ian Skerrett, Palm/Mozilla/Google's Dion Almaer, Bill de hÓra and others.

So for the HNers in the audience that have an interest in FOSS, any thoughts? How could we make it more useful for you?

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