Re: Free as in beer

Thus quoth Adam Ophir Shapira on Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 06:07:41PM -0400:
> >
> >Coders are not the best documenters.  Thats for sure.

Programmers are ever facing insane deadlines, and documentation 
ever comes last. OS projects do not suffer so much as commercial 
software. 

> >Programmers should have their non-techie friend or 
> >spouse write the documentation.  On second thought,
> >few marriages or friendships would survive that.

The bookstores are bulging with 'for dummies' books. Remember that
the author needs to learn the subject (s)he is writing about, and
that takes a few years to reach expert level, or the hack writer
will merely be rephrasing the manual. I tend just to read the
source code to find out how a program works.

> Perhapse the OSDN community should set up a network
> for *setting* *up* technical writers with programmers.

Do you mean something like the Linux Documentation Project? 
It has been running for many years now, producing many useful
(introductory) howto's and user manuals in many languages,
but we're always looking for more authors and translators.
(and the O'Reiily company also did some value work :-)

Unread documentation will not do you much good. 

Kind regards,


Daniel von Asmuth

-- 
	wat heb je nodig bij een uitzichtloos leven? euthanasie?
	nee, windows.
	van microsoft?
	nee, van glas.