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My frustration with open-source: Documentation (or lack thereof)

I have to say that the .NET world if fortunate to have a lot of open-source stuff available. I can't even tell you how much I like NUnit.

The problem I find, however, with a lot of open-source software is the complete lack or reasonable documentation. That drives me nuts, although I'm not entirely surprised. It's one thing to give away and share your work, but that scenario doesn't exactly provide a ton of incentive to document it properly.

NUnit ended up being useful to me I think because it was in use at a project I was on, and it essentially has its own book. Most stuff I've encountered doesn't have that luxury.

I'm not suggesting even for a moment that the world would be a better place without these projects, it's just that the price of entry is kind of high for something that is monetarily free.
Posted: Dec 26 2004, 08:18 PM by Jeff | with 3 comment(s)
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Comments

Chris Martin said:

But that's just the beauty of OSS. If you don't like the way something is implemented, you do it yourself and it ends up in the distribution of said software.

Not a lot of projects have a lot of resources. The idea behind OSS is an open and contributive (is that a word :) ) "society".

Take your post as an example. You don't like that one particular piece of software isn't documented sufficiently. If you care about said software, you should spend an hour and write down some helpfull words to assist others that may find said software usefull.

It's not that people don't have incentive to document (as far as a CHM) the software. It's that, more time then none, the software is pretty damn recent and not to the point of being "formally" documented for end users.

And that is precisely(sp?) why OSS projects need contributors. If *you* find it usefull, there is a very likely chance that many others do as well. Instead of complaining, you should contribute.
# December 27, 2004 12:57 AM

S Dot One said:

You got the ULTIMATE documentation with open-source... The source code itself ;)

Seriously a colleague recently was trying to run a nant script on a build server, but there were some parts missing. And by looking into the source code he could see exactly what went wrong, and what was missing.

But in general I agree, it documentation is bad quality wise.
# December 27, 2004 5:42 AM

TrackBack said:

# December 27, 2004 4:13 PM
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