Comments on Software Requirement Specificatio

Hello everyone,

thank you very much for your contributing to this interesting discussion. Am sorry for not joining the discussion much earlier.
Brief history:
In my Introduction to software engineering (ISE) lessons we had a lecture on Software Requirement Specifications (SRS). In this course we were introduced to Open Source Software (OSS) and how it works and asked to make a contribution as part of our course work. It happened that i have been using Notepad++ for sometime now and it is open source so i decided to write and contribute this SRS.
The discussion here tells me that OSS is a complicated environment (in licensing terms) and i have a lot to learn. Pshute, Bravo! i realized that most of the brilliant OSS developers never had or boast of so call university degrees, they just make good software for all to benefit!
About the SRS document. I wrote it according to a template we were given. I found the following sources very useful in writing the different sections; Notepad++ website (which i must say is very comprehensive and useful for Notepad++ users), the wiki at wikipedia, readme files, etc. However, its not perfect and i intend to be refining it as time goes on so that we Notepad++ will have additional material to use.

Fidvo and donho and Pshute: you are right about the usages of the term "Freeware".
Having done a bit of reading and asking, i learnt that the ideological debate sorrounding "Free", "Open", "Libre" is never ending. Fidvo and donho; should i go ahead with replacing the term freeware with Free Software? if this suits all in the project that's fine by me. Pshute thanks a lot for spotting some of the errors.

I will implement your suggestions and upload a new version. I previously uploaded the document using the tracker. Now i have seen many options to upload the SRS. I will upload the new version at "Documentation" > "Submit". Is that Ok?
Thanks a lot for taking your time to read and comment on the document.

I never expected you to come up with something so long. Here are some thoughts:

- By "Software Requirement Specification" I assumed you meant something like just your section 2.4.  I had not read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Requirements_Specification then, so now I know.
- What's this document for, and what would you like us to do with it?  It looks like the kind of thing you might write before the software is written.
- While there are some useful references to existing documentation, I don't understand how much of this document would be of much use beyond the documentation we already have.
- There's also an advanced find/replace (control+r).
- The English needs tweaking here and there.
- Is a GPL licence really about security?
- You mention freeware in several places.  Is Open Source really the same thing?
- You mention 4.4MB of free disk space, then imply that 4.4MB of RAM is used.
- I don't understand what a functional requirement really is, but it looks like you only found one feature that had any.  Why not just says "None" for the others?  I prefer short documents.
- Is this a school project or a project contribution?

Forgive me if I've misunderstood what the document is about.  I never went to software engineer school.