I'm still not sure I understand what is the logic that Harbour
developers
*pay* and/or *work* to generate profit (or compensate for loss) for
xhb.com,
and at the same time they don't get anything in return for the efforts.
All such "inquiries" to this list look very strange and unproductive
to me.
I reckon if Harbour developers start to work on documenting differences
and most importantly additions (which are now many), it'd be much more
preferable to create this new documentation under a free license (CC-
BY-SA)
and release as "Harbour Extensions / Addendum" over already existing and
accessible Clipper (or xhb) documentation. All Harbour extensions are
perfectly well separated from CA-Cl*pper language.
Anyhow, since all Harbour parts are freely accessible to anyone,
including
xhb developers and documentation writers, maybe it's also a viable idea
to let them do this documentation work and sell it to both Harbour and
xhb
users when finished.
For us though, I'd rather prefer the former option. This is also in line
with Vailton's recent initiative.
Brgds,
Viktor
On 2009.07.10., at 3:47, Hannes Ziegler wrote:
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
_______________________________________________
Harbour mailing list
Harbour@harbour-project.org
http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour
