[Docs] Documentation

[David Adams]

on 6/2/2001 6:25 PM, Lockepet at support@lockepet.com wrote:

> why is your documentation on manual installation so poorly written and
> practically non-existant? Why offer the interchange free if all you want is
> for someone to pay for support? Why not just state your purpose directly?
> 
> Rudy Smith
> lockepet@email.msn.com
> 

Since your email was deliberately insulting my first impulse was just to
throw it in the trash, but I decided that I'd better respond.

If you don't like Interchange, the documentation, or anything else about
what we're doing, nobody is holding a gun to your head.  Don't use it.  How
absurdly ungrateful you are!

The Interchange software has been lovingly developed over five years by
thousands of volunteer developers.  Documentation is not the favorite
pastime of most of these people, but nevertheless people volunteered
hundreds of hours documenting their work.  Interchange has been a formally
supported product for about a year, and in that time we have spent over a
hundred thousand dollars paying employees and consultants to improve and
complete the tremendous amount of documentation that a complex product like
Interchange requires.  Since we do not charge money for the Interchange
software itself, we're essentially paying all that money because we believe
that Interchange is great technology and we hope that if people understand
it better, it might provide opportunities for us to sell implementation
services.  We recognize that most of the people who use the documentation
will never pay us money, but we're willing to invest in it anyway because we
believe in open source software and hope to garner the goodwill of the
people who benefit from all our work without paying anything.

That's why your email is especially irksome.

Actually, our installation instructions are quite complete and pretty well
written.  (and shame on you for saying otherwise)  You may not have found
the correct instructions.  I realize that there's still some organization
work to do, but I see that you have no intention of making any constructive
comments, recommending any changes or, heaven forbid, actually volunteering
to contribute to the documentation.  What I do know is that tens of
thousands of Interchange users have somehow figured out how to install and
use it, and many of them are not technically savvy at all.

Those that have not been able to figure it out have usually been happy to
pay a few hundred dollars to have us or one of the other Interchange experts
out there install and set it up for them.  After all, if they were to
purchase commercial software with the same capabilities as Interchange it
would likely cost them over $100,000.

In conclusion, you should be on your knees thanking all the many volunteers
who have been a part of creating Interchange that it's there for you to use
at all.  And you should be grateful that there's even one scrap of
documentation for you to read free of charge.  You should be extra grateful
that even if you can't figure it out from the documentation, you're not shut
out for your ignorance.  For a very reasonable price, we'll hold your hand
all the way through it.  And if you're too poor or too cheap to pay for
that, you can join the Interchange mailing list and volunteer developers
would probably help you for free, just because they're nice people.


David Adams
Red Hat E-Business Solutions
interchange.redhat.com
703-456-2924 Office
202-422-3283 Mobile