Even as I eschew the idea of catering to “stupid users” with Open Source software, I find the idea of collaborative software documentation interesting. Software does need good documentation, and the best documentation systems enable users to augment the documentation by adding their own findings to the existing body of documentation. A good example of how this can work is the annotated PHP manual.

Andrew Leonard writes about the sad state of user documentation for Linux in Salon today. I’m still in the “barriers to entry are a good thing” camp as far as software goes. Every user that doesn’t know what they’re doing and ties up developers by asking tedious questions burns time that could be spent working on new capabilities and bug fixes. If you don’t want to suffer the pain involved with learning, then stick with something you already know.

Bill Gates sees only a limited role for Linux. Meteorologists predict that the sun will again rise in the east tomorrow. This is news?

Laura Lemay’s new Perl book is outstanding.

Jon Bosak and Tim Bray have written an article about XML, and its impending effect on the Web. Informed readers may remember Bosak’s earlier article written in October of 1997, “XML, Java, and the Future of the Web.”

Jamais Cascio sent me this news of life on Mars.

Wired News has a funny story about Network Solutions yanking the domain registration for the Aberdeen Group, an information technology analysis firm.

Tara Calishain runs the web log for computer book authors over at Studio B.

Only two weeks after opening their own auctions, Amazon.com is buying another auction firm, LiveBid.

Salon’s Scott Rosenberg talks about Microsoft and Open Source.