You can read about them at OpenSource.org . I use and recommend the GNU General Public License for software and the GNU Lesser General Public License for libraries. As a result, when I don't have other standards to follow, I gravitate toward GNU's guidelines. Maintaining GNU Software GNU Coding Standards Documentation One of the areas that GNU takes care to cover in guidelines is documentation. They have developed a system known as Texinfo that is meant as a documentation system.
Source files use a simple markup scheme that is relatively easy to read and interpret.
For the flexibility that it provides, I prefer to write software documentation using Texinfo. You could almost call make a standard, but its exact behavior varies from distribution to distribution. Variable Naming Variable naming is one aspect of programming on which everyone has a different opinion. The fact of the matter is that there are many factors that go into variable naming and most people try to optimize one or the other. Getting Started Eleftherios Gkioulekas has written a nice introduction to the GNU Development Tools .