How you choose to make technical content available online sends a message about how you do business and what you think about your content and customers…

🌐 Available fully for free on the web: You want your technical content to be as easy to find as possible. You want it to be easily searched, shared, and copied. You don’t mind if competitors know how your product works, because you also want prospective and current customers to know. You want your product and its technical capabilities to be part of the online and offline conversations. You can easily update the content and make sure that people access the most recent version.

🔐 Available on the web, but only if you log in first: You fear your competitors and think that secrecy is your product’s competitive advantage. Existing customers can access your content, but only them. Prospective customers can read your marketing content and talk to sales. If they aren’t paying you, they can’t have a conversation about what your product really does.

📄 Available only as a PDF: You want to make your content available on the web, but just barely. You want to pretend your content is easy to find, but it isn’t easy to search for the content inside the PDF, share a specific part of the content, copy information from it, or link on the web. If you publish content as a PDF, you don’t want to be part of the conversation about the content—you don’t care how people get or share the content, or what questions they might have about it. It’s a bit onerous to publish a new version of the content, and difficult to ensure that people that accessed the earlier versions of the PDF get access to the latest updated one.

With all this in mind, I personally don’t understand why Meta chose to publish their Responsible Use Guide for Llama 2 as a PDF, instead of as part of the user guide for the model. Their own user documentation is reduced to pointing to the PDF and instructing readers to “refer to pages 14–17” of the PDF.¹

Maybe there were some legal restrictions preventing Meta from publishing the guide as part of their official documentation for Llama 2, but it’s certainly sending a clear message—Meta wants you to have information about responsibly using the model, but they don’t care if you find it, or what you do with it.