The dedication of the WP community is phenomenal in every area from docs to dealing with bugs, to wish fulfillment (almost) in new editions. That kind of community feeling comes from strong volunteerism and builds on itself.

Thanks for your insightful comment and for sharing real-world examples in implementing open source. You said, “There are talented writers on my team, but there is a point at which the technical expertise ends and we are forced to tap a development or IT resource to get us out of a jam.”

I think this is where open source software finds a business model. The code may be free, but not the consulting and training fees needed to implement it.

I think you’re right about technical writers not having to fear losing their jobs if their company produces open source software. I guess I should tweak what I wrote a bit. Maybe companies will force tech pubs to pull their own weight. Right now a lot of tech pubs departments piggyback on the IT budget. If the company delivered open source software, perhaps the training surrounding that software would be a peripheral sale. Free software, but the training videos costs $100. If no one buys the training videos, the tech pubs department starves. Or something like that.

Thanks for your comment. You said, “there is no assurance of accountability or support from free software.” That’s certainly true, and this gap provides a market for the peripheral activities required to make the open source model work. There’s a lot of certification, licensing, integration, customization, training, support, etc. that is required when using open source software in the corporate environment. Third-party companies (and the companies that make the open source software) can supply these peripherals — that’s in part the business model behind open source.

You also said something that struck me as being very relevant: technical writers can volunteer their time with documentation for open source projects. How many times have you heard from would-be tech writers that they don’t have experience, and so they can’t get a job, but they can’t get experience without a job? Well, there’s tons of ways to get experience writing help for open source.

I keep meaning to volunteer my time with the WordPress codex, but haven’t quite made that jump yet. Thanks again for your comment.

Good post. I love WordPress. Firefox, and other open-source apps you mention in the post.

I think you needn’t be worried about tech writers loosing jobs due to the open-source movement. While your example of Yahoo Pipes is an interesting example of people stepping up and producing documentation for a product, I’d guess that this type of response is an exception more than the rule.

In my opinion, tech writers have about as much to fear, professionally, as do programmers. After all, there are thousands of people out there writing open-source code for free. Does that mean that programmers are going to run out of paid work? None of the developers on my team are worried about it.

While you may find people willing to step up to the plate for large projects like WordPress or Firefox, software companies are still going to need to hire technical communicators for those projects that aren’t WordPresses or Firefoxes, but still need documentation.

My experience with open-source software has been that documentation is generally one area in which open-source projects are very weak–another reason why I don’t think technical communicators should feel particularly threatened. At least at this point.

And as far as documentation never being done — I’m in that boat right now! We have a young but maturing product, and each release there are tons of new features, changed features, and deprecated features. I’m a lone writer, and keeping track of the documentation beast is a big job!

People love many things about open source software – the price, the community, likelihood of reported bugs or feature requests being addressed – but this love is usually expressed by hobbyists, not by the corporate world. Not to say that open source software is inherently inferior to closed-source, but there is no assurance of accountability or support from free software.

There are exceptions to this statement, of course. The open source Apache web server outnumbers Microsoft’s IIS, the number 2 server, by at least 200%. This is largely due to Apache’s excellent documentation and enormous user-driven support base. In true corporate fashion the determining factor of what tools to use resides in return on investment – a term Microsoft uses as its primary defence against the free Linux operating system.

The proliferation of blogging in private and corporate sectors would explain why the free Wordpress is outpacing the commercial Movable Type, but it doesn’t really explain why the latter would be losing customers. I’d have thought businesses would flock to commercial platforms for no reason other than it costs money and comes with a service plan.

On the hobbyist side I simply adore open source software. I tend to use only software that increases my abilities and saves me time, and it’s impressive to note that nearly half the software I use is free and open source. Simply trawling through open source community sites like http://www.sourceforge.net often gives me ideas for new ways of using my computer. It’s really empowering and exciting!

(aside – Technical Writers between jobs should consider volunteering time to SourceForge. It’s a great way to get your name out there!)

I encourage users of free open source software (aka FOSS) to communicate their appreciation to the authors, either through praise, bug reports, feature requests, or better yet, offering to volunteer!