> On Tue, 07 Jul 2009, Hannes Ziegler wrote: > > Hi, > > > I have followed this thread with great interest and would like to add my > > 2cents as the external help author who has written the xHarbour docs: > > 1) Programmers are no help authors > > 2) Software cannot be spread without good documentation > > 3) xHarbour.com has invested into good documentation > > 4) Harbour programmers have failed to produce good documentation > > 5) It is impossible to create good documentation from source code > > Conclusion: > > I don't know nothing about contracts between Harbour/xHarbour, but IMO it is > > absurd to create two times a documentation for almost the same thing. Maybe > > the Harbour users should learn that services cost money, even in the open > > source era. The service of producing documentation is not created by Harbour > > developers but by xHarbour.com, which has bought my services for this very > > issue. > > In my opinion the easiest way to create documentation for Harbour is > updating existing xHarbour documentation to cover the differences between > both compilers. I think it can be done with relatively small cost so there > is big chance that incomes from selling such commercial product will cover > quite fast additional xHarbour.com investment and begin to return at list > partially money invested before. > So maybe instead of donating Harbour projects users interested in such > documentation can declare that they will buy it from xHarbour.com. > Maybe some of them can even prepay for the incoming product so xHarbour.com > will have guarantied money back from the additional investment. Anyhow it > depends only on xHarbour.com decision so we can only ask if they are > interested in it. > The good thing in such solution is that we clearly keep commercial and > free parts well separated. I'm afraid that donations can be source of > some new problems. It's very hard to merge commercial and free projects > and make everybody happy. > > best regards, > Przemek >
Przemyslaw, IMO, the easiest way to produce a Harbour documentation is to get the Harbour developers documenting differences to xHarbour. Then they should file this information to xHarbour.com and let them merge it into the xHarbour docs. The Harbour community can then go and purchase a copy of the xHarbour.com docs, thus making Patrick's offer feasable. If I remember correctly, Patrick needs another 630 sales of the current xHarbour documentation before making the source code of the xHarbour docs public. IMO there should be 630 Harbour users willing to spend 49 USD on a good documentation (I believe there shouldn't be too much difference between Harbour and xHarbour). 49$ is a lot of money for users that use only free open source software. However, 49$ is a small amount of money to help a programming language survive. This is especially true for programmers who know only THIS programming language. IMO Harbour and xHarbour both target the Clipper programming language. There should'nt be too much of a difference between the documentation of Harbour and xHarbour. My 2cnt -- Hannes _______________________________________________ Harbour mailing list Harbour@harbour-project.org http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour
