Quoting Greg Twyford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > David Guest wrote: > > Ross > >> >> I think this highlights one of the problems for Argus Support. You keep >> your domain knowledge all in-house. One cannot ask one's mate for help >> because he got the same answer and gave up on Argus because it all >> seemed too hard. >> >> As I said before I think you need to build an on-line community. It will >> make things much easier for you. > > snip
> And they often need support when they try to do thing they don't yet understand and get into trouble. Hi Greg I'm on hols too. As such I've been playing around with stuff, e.g. wifidog, ewrt, openwrt, Rails, Turbogears (The eggs doesn't appear to compile on Badger with gcc 4, Tim), postgresql 8, apache2 and a whack of other stuff as well. I didn't really know what I was doing so I broke a lot of the software toys and even managed to brick a wrt54g. It's been terrific fun. The great thing about it is that there's a ton of stories out there about how to do stuff. What works. What doesn't. There are archives, mailing lists, irc, the wikipedia and increasingly very helpful blogs. I got some nice mails back from a couple of the Portland Oregon ewrt developers when I complained that there was no room on the jffs /opt directory for my customised home page. They pointed me to a prerelease version of their software which had some experimental binaries removed and hence more room. So, as near as I can tell, there appear to be about a hundred million people out there talking to each other about how to use computers to do stuff. That seems like a good idea. A hundred million people can't be wrong. > Sadly, what Ross offers will suit techies when they first encounter Argus,and most non-do-it-yourselfers will rely on them as well. If Argus is to remain freeware then providing technical support and project management for a fee is their best source of potential revenue. Can it be had both ways? I doubt it. In my view there are two problems with Argus (four if you include java and HeSA :-). Firstly it's a grey box. It's not black in that you can get an idea of where they've been by seeing their 18 month old source code. (Aside - I thought this was supposed to be six months.) However, it is hard enough attracting developers to work on open source code let alone archival versions. Secondly they need to talk more. Talk to their users. Talk to the techie support. They need to get some Argus buzz happening and grow a community that's at least partially self supporting. There's only one point in having the same conversation a hundred times over. I got my first MedObjs letter this morning so the window of opportunity may be closing for Argus. > ps. I haven't looked at Pitiful yet. Leave it a week. I am rewriting it. > Holidays are just that. Yep. :-) David _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
