[antlr-interest] [v3] Lack of documentation

David Piepgrass qwertie256 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 2 11:08:24 PDT 2007


> Are you really saying that devoting 20 years of my life to make the
> best tools possible is not generous?  You kidding me?  others are
> more generous?  You've got to be kidding me.  People swoop in and
> built a few patches or whatever and then move on.  Rare few start

Sorry, I don't know if you've understood me.

Your 20 years of effort is very generous! Very generous indeed! And
I'm happy to pay for your book (please tell me you get much more than
$3 when I bought the PDF for $24).

Yet there are other projects, large open source projects, that not
only give away the product and the source code but also the
documentation. For example, the SharpDevelop folks give away their
book on SharpDevelop. Unfortunately it's poorly edited and has lots of
errors, but er... if we can overlook that, I hope you can see my
point.

Yes, I do think there are some people that are more generous in that
they give away everything including books and docs, but let me make
this clear: it's not a contest. You've done good work and deserve
compensation.

Just as all who work on important open-source projects deserve compensation.

And it sucks that the only way to get compensated is to resort to
selling closed copies that the reader is not free to reproduce. It's
the opposite of open source, after all. But that's just how our
society works. You sell copies or you don't get paid. Well, you can
also sell support, but in order to sell support, it helps to create a
reason that people need support: i.e. by having insufficient or poorly
organized documentation (note: I'm not talking about ANTLR here!). In
other words it makes sense that open-source projects that sell support
get more income the poorer their documentation is.

Again, I think it's a limitation of our laws/institutions, and you
can't blame Ter for it.

- David


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