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It's open source, you get what you pay for. Actually, you get much more, but you need to fill any gaps with your own efforts. Accessing the spread out documenta
by usr1106 5y ago
It's open source, you get what you pay for. Actually, you get much more, but you need to fill any gaps with your own efforts. Accessing the spread out documentation is one of them.
While they are not comparable entities I'd say systemd documentation is in better shape than Linux kernel documentation. (Not to negate the efforts of those who do work with kernel documentation, but to stress the huge areas of no or pretty obsolete documentation).
Of course you can buy Linux (incl. user space) from the commercial players. I have only worked in one small project in my career that did, but I did not notice that better documentation was worth paying for.
- rkachowski 5y agoThe idea that good documentation requires payment is defeated by the huge amount of open source projects with excellent documentation.
- usr1106 5y agoI did not say that every open source project produces insufficient documentation. But some central ones that are hard to avoid do. There complaining doesn't help, you just need to invest your efforts. Ideally you could contribute better documentation, but at least you have to make the effort to learn it for yourself.
- pmontra 5y agoPaying for something doesn't guarantee good documentation. Example: I read many people complaining about Apple [1] My take is that pay vs free software and good vs bad documentation are orthogonal and you can be in any of the four quadrants. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/swift/comments/ljl6bq/we_were_so_frustrated_by_apple_docs_that_we_made/ https://www.reddit.com/r/swift/comments/ljl6bq/we_were_so_fr...
- Sebb767 5y ago> My take is that pay vs free software and good vs bad documentation are orthogonal and you can be in any of the four quadrants. It's definitely not independent. Few people enjoy writing documentation and even then, it takes a lot of time. Plus, writing good documentation is something you need to train for. Very few OS people want to spend their free time writing code and then spend just as much again for - usually boring - documentation and support tasks. Companies have exactly the same problem, but they have the option to throw money at the problem. Sure, there are some OS projects with good documentation (usually sponsored by a company) and a lot of proprietary stuff without, but proprietary software usually has more financial backing and that's directly related to good documentation.
- pmontra 5y agoI generally agree with you but let me enumerate the FOSS projects that I use and that have good documentation. Not explicitly company backed: Ruby, Python. Backed by multiple companies: PostgreSQL, JavaScript. Backed by one company: Ruby on Rails, Elixir and Phoenix, Nginx. Don't know: Django, Apache Httpd. Of course I might be wrong about the categories.
- usr1106 5y ago> paying for something doesn't guarantee good documentation. Isn't that what I said when referring to commercial Linux distros? Of course it would be easy to continue enumerating. But morally it entitles you much more the complain if you pay and it's poor quality than if you just get it for free with no promises.