At 12:22 PM 10/17/02 -0700, Lior Shliechkorn wrote:
Limited knowledge, and often confusion, doesn't attribute to questions being asked in the same way that you, who have that knowledge, would like things phrased. I don't need people to gang up on me and tell me that I'm being "rude and arrogant" in the way I ask thingsWhat Lior has underlined, and what we really should take to heart, is the manner
in which the Open Source movement is occasionally its own worst enemy.
Let's face it...the documentation is often nonexistent, out of date, or generally awful.
Tomcat is a beautiful thing...with ugly docs that merit the forgoing criticisms.
Now to be fair, I can't blame anyone for not writing docs for free. After all, one of the FEW
ways to make money in Open Source is to write for O'Reilly or Que or whomever. But
of course you can't do that when the target is moving really really fast. Or not effectively
anyway. I also can't blame them because *I* haven't done it, and so I don't get to
bitch too loud :-) And some fine folks already have exceeded the call of duty by
giving us, I say GIVING us Tomcat!
But look at where the jakarta.apache.com points us to for FAQs...jguru.com, which is a
for-pay site! That's just a bad strategy, when there are so many nice FAQ hosting
packages available under the CopyLeft.
Dumb little things, like 'don't use the RPMs,' the explanation which a couple of guys
here gave me for my teething troubles, can consume a lot of time. They ate a day of
mine. I admit, I hesitated about posting what seemed to me to be a dumb question
here, for fear of getting into a flame-war when someone might say 'RTFM.'
The alternatives, like Cold Fusion, have kick-ass documentation, both with the
server and written by a few supporters of the platform. The reason that CF
has been so successful...and is apt to fail now...is because it early on gave
software developers what they wanted to build things quickly, easily, and in
a way they could make a good living. Since Macromedia is falling down on
that 'give the developers what they want' measure, there's an opportunity for
the combination of Tomcat and the Jakarta classes/tags to sieze a big chunk
of that following.
This stuff *is* kind of hard to get going on. Without well-organize docs, it's REALLY
hard. When the next thing is that someone slaps you around for asking what they
regard as a 'dumb' question, well it doesn't do much for the proliferation of the
platform.
Greg
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