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Open Source, Closed Documentation?
sunset asks: "Recently I was motivated to look at WebGUI which looks like a pretty cool open source project. However I was having trouble making it work with Red Hat 8.0 which includes Apache 2.0. This seems like a reasonable thing to want, as Red Hat 8 has been out since September and Apache 2 has been publicly released for close to a year. Checking the WebGUI community discussion forum, I found that
someone else had already inquired about this. Following the rest of the thread, you learn that the product's vendor considers this information to be proprietary, and that you must pay $50 to join their Support Forum to get the information. It gets better. The associated Membership Agreement for the Support Forum includes the clause 'You shall not to share [sic] the information contained herein with any other party.' So if I join up, I am locked out of sharing valuable information with the open source community about how to install this open source product. In the end I found out what I needed to know without giving up my rights or my hard-earned bucks, but frankly this attitude from the vendor pisses me off. Am I alone in this? What do you think?"
So stop bitching. You can read the source, and the source should ne something of a manual in and of itself.
If you really don't like it, branch the product (provided the license allows such a thing), and write your OWN documentation. Everyone says competition is good, so compete, and figure out who can do better.
Or get a group of users of this product together and set up a documentation project. Never look at their docs, just 'reverse engineer' them.
There's lots of stuff you can do. I've named three things off the top of my head. Stop being so whiny and either DO something, or be quiet.
"Get off your ass and write some documentation, help other people like the Gimp authors helped you."
And what am I supposed to document?
"First hit new, then move this thing around. And then.. uh.. well that's as far as I got because I don't have any documentation."
I'm all for people sharing their ideas on techniques, but basic functionality of a product MUST be documented. It doesn't matter if the price tag is 'free' or not. How can you possibly expect free software to succeed if people can't use it? That problem alone could kill open source.