I work with pedagogies, teach, write curricula, coach, manage, mentor, consult, speak publicly, polemicize, and sometimes work as a full-stack web developer, architect, ontologist, and more.
This seems like an awful lot of effort to tar me as a bigot while painting yourself as an enlightened being, but all your claims are either straw men or attacking the messenger.
Whether I'm a hypocrite or not has no bearing on my comments. They stand or fall on their own merits. Your attempt to be clever and "flip the script" merely reveals the poverty of your own "arguments". I never said anything about non-native English speakers, for example, so what's that about?
And I have to laugh at your knee-jerk repetition of the old "free speech/free beer" argument. I've been around long enough to remember when that argument was first made by Stallman. But when the developers of most open-source apps say "free", they mean free as in free beer.
Yes, their software is also free as in free speech, but what they are telling their users is that it will cost them nothing to use the software. This is an insidious lie, and the OSS community has gone to great lengths to play down the total cost of ownership, for obvious reasons. But read the history and you will see that internally there has been acknowledgement and continual discussion of the problem of usability and hidden costs.
What surprises me is how many devs are cheerleaders for the status quo and bad documentation, despite that the lack of good documentation is very harmful to the OSS effort. Are you secretly a paid shill for big tech? Why else would you aggressively defend crappy documentation and insist that nothing needs to change?
In my 20+ years of work as a developer of both proprietary and open software, I have not once met a single developer who is a cheerleader for bad documentation. They may not write good documentation - or indeed any documentation - but they've all been aware of the value of good documentation, and would be delighted to accept contributions of documentation for their projects.
I don't believe that you have ever met one of those people either.
I work with pedagogies, teach, write curricula, coach, manage, mentor, consult, speak publicly, polemicize, and sometimes work as a full-stack web developer, architect, ontologist, and more.
What is the relevance of your comment? Did I say that devs are cheerleaders for bad documentation? I'm not seeing it in my comment.
I'm pretty sure that what I said is that a lot of OSS devs spend a significant amount of time and effort trying to convince people to use their "free" and wonderful software, but can't be arsed to check that their documentation makes that anything other than an exercise in futility. "Free" my ass.
I have personally lost thousands of hours struggling to make various OSS packages work when one or two lines of text in the documentation could have saved me the trouble. The disrespect is astonishing.
Anyone and everyone who uses OSS software regularly knows what I'm talking about. Not sure what planet you hail from.
Was it not you who said "What surprises me is how many devs are cheerleaders for the status quo and bad documentation" then? Seems like you need to change your password because someone else logged in and posted that foolishness as you.
I work with pedagogies, teach, write curricula, coach, manage, mentor, consult, speak publicly, polemicize, and sometimes work as a full-stack web developer, architect, ontologist, and more.
Well, you got me there. That said, I did not mean it the way you interpreted it, but I can see how you did.
Put more carefully, a lot of devs are eager to defend the status quo and overlook bad documentation. In that respect, they are definitely cheerleaders for the status quo, and effectively for bad documentation, although they almost certainly don't see it that way.
Maybe a little less literal in your interpretations? I note, too, that you do not acknowledge or bemoan the pathetic state of most OSS documentation, but merely attack the messenger. Should I read that as you like or at least don't mind bad documentation?
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This seems like an awful lot of effort to tar me as a bigot while painting yourself as an enlightened being, but all your claims are either straw men or attacking the messenger.
Whether I'm a hypocrite or not has no bearing on my comments. They stand or fall on their own merits. Your attempt to be clever and "flip the script" merely reveals the poverty of your own "arguments". I never said anything about non-native English speakers, for example, so what's that about?
And I have to laugh at your knee-jerk repetition of the old "free speech/free beer" argument. I've been around long enough to remember when that argument was first made by Stallman. But when the developers of most open-source apps say "free", they mean free as in free beer.
Yes, their software is also free as in free speech, but what they are telling their users is that it will cost them nothing to use the software. This is an insidious lie, and the OSS community has gone to great lengths to play down the total cost of ownership, for obvious reasons. But read the history and you will see that internally there has been acknowledgement and continual discussion of the problem of usability and hidden costs.
What surprises me is how many devs are cheerleaders for the status quo and bad documentation, despite that the lack of good documentation is very harmful to the OSS effort. Are you secretly a paid shill for big tech? Why else would you aggressively defend crappy documentation and insist that nothing needs to change?
In my 20+ years of work as a developer of both proprietary and open software, I have not once met a single developer who is a cheerleader for bad documentation. They may not write good documentation - or indeed any documentation - but they've all been aware of the value of good documentation, and would be delighted to accept contributions of documentation for their projects.
I don't believe that you have ever met one of those people either.
What is the relevance of your comment? Did I say that devs are cheerleaders for bad documentation? I'm not seeing it in my comment.
I'm pretty sure that what I said is that a lot of OSS devs spend a significant amount of time and effort trying to convince people to use their "free" and wonderful software, but can't be arsed to check that their documentation makes that anything other than an exercise in futility. "Free" my ass.
I have personally lost thousands of hours struggling to make various OSS packages work when one or two lines of text in the documentation could have saved me the trouble. The disrespect is astonishing.
Anyone and everyone who uses OSS software regularly knows what I'm talking about. Not sure what planet you hail from.
So what exactly is your point?
Was it not you who said "What surprises me is how many devs are cheerleaders for the status quo and bad documentation" then? Seems like you need to change your password because someone else logged in and posted that foolishness as you.
Well, you got me there. That said, I did not mean it the way you interpreted it, but I can see how you did.
Put more carefully, a lot of devs are eager to defend the status quo and overlook bad documentation. In that respect, they are definitely cheerleaders for the status quo, and effectively for bad documentation, although they almost certainly don't see it that way.
Maybe a little less literal in your interpretations? I note, too, that you do not acknowledge or bemoan the pathetic state of most OSS documentation, but merely attack the messenger. Should I read that as you like or at least don't mind bad documentation?