Documentation, sadly, is a sour topic for many open source networking projects. Web frameworks and libraries, graphics software, sometimes even games have more detailed documentation than some of the widely used network software projects.

People have to resort to asking on the forum and chat channels and reading random blog posts, that may not be up to date or even correct—it’s up to the users to discern and decide what to do.

Proprietary vendors often suffer from the exact same problems, but since the source is closed, only their authors can write authoritative documentation. With free and open-source software, everyone can figure out every detail from the source code, and everyone can contribute to the documentation as well. As a community, we likely can do it better

We are glad to see so many people contribute to VyOS documentation lately. That’s important work that helps many people, and project itself. Good documentation is important as anything else

Happy to share the results of our work on LTS releases with people who write the docs!

If you are a contributor and don’t have an VyOS Access subscription yet, let us know, and we’ll give you one at no cost!

Important!

VyOS is not a self-contained project. It’s only possible thanks to numerous open networking projects like FRR, keepalived, and many others. Those projects also need help with documentation on regular basis.

We’ve been giving VyOS Access subscriptions to people who contribute to the code of our upstream projects for a while, it's time to expand this offer to people who help our upstream projects with writing docs.

Now we say it officially: if you are contributing to the VyOS documentation or any of our upstream projects, you are also eligible for a free VyOS Access subscription. If you are helping a project that we don’t use, we can still give free subscription on a case by case basis.

Let’s make the open networking ecosystem better together!

What needs to be done?

Many things! First of all, writing new documentation is only one of all important activities. Proofreading and editing is just as important. For example, Stephen James made a huge proofreading effort in the vyos-documentation lately, and that’s a very important work.

Sometimes, there’s clearly not enough documentation for a feature. People ask about configuring QoS often, but the QoS page is full of stubs and needs real life examples.

Likewise, OSPFv3 is no longer the broken protocol as it used to be, but its page is almost non-existent.

FRR docs need help too

RIPng documentation is incomplete

NHRP documentation is out of date

BGP documentation is missing many commands and can benefit from examples

RPKI documentation needs examples

Every upstream project is welcome

And that’s just in VyOS docs. FRR docs also have their issues. Some parts of the FRR docs that need attention:

If we use your project in the VyOS distribution, we will be happy to give VyOS Access subscriptions to everyone who contributes to your code and docs.

If you want your project listed in our posts, feel free to contact us.

If you are already a contributor

If you have already contributed to VyOS itself or any of its upstream projects, and you want a free VyOS Access Subscription, don't hesitate to apply. Just fill the application form and we'll get back to you.

Please be specific and make sure to include links to commits, Phabricator tasks, MediaWiki revisions, or some other details of your contributions. We do remember many contributors personally, but sometimes it gets difficult to keep track of everything.