1.1 Description

GNU philosophy is the GNU Project’s exhaustive collection of articles and essays about free software and related matters. It provides all of them standalone or collected as a huge single book, in Info, HTML, PDF, plain text, and every other format supported by Texinfo, in several different languages. It makes the individual Texinfo source code of any essay readily available for inclusion in another package’s documentation and also implements a way to generate the whole GNU website philosophy section automatically from the Texinfo sources. Last, but not least, it facilitates the future work of the FSF (Free Software Foundation) in the publication of free software articles collection books, like: “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”.

Some highlighted benefits are:

• It is more easy to spread GNU philosophy. The availability of several formats means that it is simpler for people to find the desired article in a file format that fits their constraints and suits the access, redistribution and presentation requirements.
• Besides its free software components, the GNU system ought to document its own philosophy. It is very natural for users to expect that the philosophy and history that inspired the GNU system existence be easily accessible within its documentation system.
• It makes life easier for authors who want to use their package documentation to spread the GNU philosophy. Before it there was no easy way to get GNU philosophical articles in an adequate format to include in arbitrary documentation; many articles only existed in HTML specifically tailored for GNU website, others only in plain text format hidden deeply inside package distributions, and a bunch in non-portable Texinfo extensively written for exclusive TeX processing.
• All essays and articles are written in the GNU Project’s standard, official and hub format: Texinfo. Making the GNU philosophical documents comply with GNU standards assists in uniformity and coherence. For instance, until this package conception it was remarkable the almost complete lack of essays in Info, the GNU Project’s official online documentation format.
• There is a single place of maintenance for GNU Project’s philosophical articles and essays. The upkeep of all GNU Project’s philosophy documents is optimized since no error must be corrected twice and every addition is atomically, and instantaneously, available in every supported format, for every intended purpose.

The maintainers set a clear commitment to not blindly take for granted the quality of automatic generated output, and therefore they adapt the Texinfo source code for the particularities of each available output format, in order to make it look better, but without the unmindful and excessive use of back-end specific code.