Of course it "should" be!

Every child "should" have enough to eat and a good education too, but
few people live in an environment where they'd have the cheek to
demand it as if it's an inherent *right* - someone's got to develop
the skills and put in the time and effort to earn the money to make it
happen.

So of course every FOSS should have good docs - the question is
written by whom? In most cases the answer is - by the user community.
The developer's time is better spent actually working on the code.

It would be great if the developer(s) could facilitate - set up a
wiki, put good notes in the source code, be available to review for
accuracy, answer the more technical questions etc.

But on a small un-sponsored project, the developer has no "obligation"
to anyone to do anything - he's been so incredibly generous to share
the code he wrote to scratch his own itch, that the least the
freeloading users can do is contribute back where they can.

If a user wants to be able to be "demanding", then they should become
a donor/sponsor/paid customer of the project's development. Any
attitude of entitlement to free resources is not only selfish but
unrealistic.

All of this is just my opinion of course. . .



On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 8:30 PM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard AT eircom DOT net> 
wrote:
> hansbkk AT gmail DOT com wrote:
>
>> if a user takes the
>> attitude that a program "should have" well-written documentation
>> designed for non-technical users to understand, and any program that
>> doesn't is somehow deficient in his eyes, then perhaps he would be
>> better served as a paying customer of a company he then has the right
>> to complain to.
>
> I completely disagree.
> Any program offered to the public should be properly documented.
> This has nothing to do with open source.
>
> --
> Timothy Murphy
> e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
> tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
> s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
>
>
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