The open source not-for-profit organisations FLOSS Manuals Foundation and Sourcefabric are pleased to announce their newly forged partnership to maintain and develop the code base behind FLOSS Manuals' successful free software documentation platform.

Said Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals: "We've been actively looking for partners to help achieve our mission. As FM goes from strength to strength, we're happy to partner with an organisation that has the track record of Sourcefabric in order to allow our platform to grow even further."

FLOSS Manuals' open source platform is designed to help people produce books on free software, by themselves or working collaboratively with others. Users can create books, work on the content, and then export content in minutes as book-formatted PDFs or EPUBs.

Recent features have enabled users to keep track of the activity of everyone working on their project, chat with them in real time, and post Twitter-like status messages. All books are released under the GNU General Public License, meaning content can be reused and remixed by other books and authors, by simply cloning books or importing chapters.

"In partnering with FLOSS Manuals, we will contribute resources to developing the platform and will help apply this highly successful model to other fields," said Sava Tatić, managing director at Sourcefabric. "Mainstream publishing, journalism and education sectors are all looking for new ways to author, edit and distribute books. FLOSS Manuals has shown it can be done successfully with a platform that is free, open source and highly collaborative."

About Sourcefabric

The Czech-based Sourcefabric produces open source tools for media organisations including Airtime, Newscoop, and Superdesk. They have previously funded new features for the FLOSS Manuals platform and host all their software documentation on the site in English, Spanish and Russian. Since launching in April 2010, Sourcefabric has won a Knight-Batten Award and was a finalist in the Ashoka Changemakers Citizen Media Innovation Contest.

The Sourcefabric team used Floss Manuals to write the Newscoop Cookbook.

About the FLOSS Manuals Foundation

The FLOSS Manuals Foundation fosters the growing FLOSS Manuals language communities with over 3,000 registered members who have produced books on tools like Firefox and Wordpress and titles such as How to Bypass Internet Censorship. Through its work on the documentation software as well as facilitating Book Sprints and Documentation Sprints, FLOSS Manuals Foundation works to support the production of Free Manuals for Free Software.

For more information, contact Camille E. Acey at Floss Manuals.