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Re: Documentation Standards was Re: [ox-en] UserLinux



On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 10:03:21PM -0000, Niall Douglas wrote:
Some programmers, who regrettably appear to be concentrated within 
certain parts of the free software movement, take the view that 
computer programming should be returned to a medieval tradecraft 
whereby the tradesperson holds all of their skill in memory and 
experience and form guilds to maintain it not becoming public 
knowledge. Needless to say, anything approaching reasonable 
documentation is a distinct no-no.

It is however easy to read conspiracy into programmers skipping good 
documentation. To be fair, it's far more likely that many programmers 
are slightly autistic and thus writing English is much harder than 
writing code. Nevertheless, I can see some being motivated by a 
desire to return computing back to the "golden age" when it was 
"pure" though of course, they'd never ever admit that.

Sorry, i dont get this. In my experience free software is the best
documented software available on this planet. Everytime i have to work
with proprietary software in the last 20 years it was very bad
documented. These days this is not very often necessary and i am glad
to work with better and better documentation. "Free software has no
documentation" was one of the oldest bias about it. (Ok, one exeption:
Gnome tends to mimic Windows that much, that it trys to have the same
stupid documentation. They have both very helpless helpfiles, which
explaines nothing but the obvious.)

By the way: the original thread focuses on _licenses_ for
documentation and not about the quality of it. But maybe i got it
completely wrong, my english is not the best.

Benni
-- 
http://www.aymargeddon.de

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