iFixit Manuals now free to the public
The popular site iFixIt that specializes in take-apart guides for Apple products, has announced they are releasing all of their manuals for free to the public under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
The website "iFixIt" has been a goldmine of information and how-to instructions for repairing various models of Macintosh that have been released over the years, starting with the "Pismo" PowerBook G3 in 2004. Their take-apart manuals have been filled with detailed photographs and illustrations that clearly show the steps for replacing parts, and accessing components for servicing. On December 15th, they licensed all of their repair manuals to the public for free.
This is great news for the Macintosh community, as it will allow people who have older computers to more easily repair their systems. The manuals have been released under the "Creative Commons" BY-NC-SA license, which gives everyone the ability to share, modify, and build upon the works as long as they are distributed in the public domain.
I am personally quite grateful that iFixIt is doing this, because it will augment the current set of guides with notes and added details from other users. Take-apart manuals of this caliber are useful to have around, especially for those of us who regularly use older computing hardware.
Currently, while the manuals are open to anyone who has access to them, they are still only available as they always have been from the iFixIt website; however, iFixIt will make access to them much easier next year by providing the manuals in an XML feed. Additionally, they will be seeding the manuals with BitTorrent file sharing services and hosting them in the Internet Archive.
iFixIt is clearly changing their approach to Mac repair, and are creating a place where people can go to contribute and access information about fixing the hardware on their systems. In June of this year, iFixIt released a system for users to submit their own take-apart guides. Coupled with this current announcment it appears that in their own way iFixIt is gearing their site to be a wikipedia of sorts for Macintosh repair guides and manuals.
iFixIt has a press release with more information about this move. To see all the guides, just go to iFixIt.com, click either "Repair" or "Teardown", and browse away.
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