>>> On Sun, Jan 6, 2008 at 10:26 AM, in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, J R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: -snip- > Many of us on this list make our livings as ISVs, largely based on > knowledge accrued over many decades. While offering assistance > and tidbits of information and know-how is the nature of the beast, > you are asking these people for the keys to their kingdom. > > Scraps are free, but what you are asking for is a full-blown product. > > This comes at a price whether it be for a complete off-the-shelf > solution, bespoke design and development, education or books > and documentation. > > If Binyamin has such a document, you can bet he's invested an > enormous amount of time and effort developing and maintaining it.
That's one way of looking at it. One other way is that if such documentation were freely available, people who want to write code can concentrate on that instead of spending enormous amounts of time doing research. Just think how much more time could be spent actually implementing desirable new features, fixing reported bugs, etc. if that were the case. Yes, that information is valuable to the person who has developed it, but only because they _had_ to develop it. This idea is one reason why wikis are becoming so popular. Most people want to concentrate on what they're good at, or what actually interests them, not spending many fruitless hours banging their head against a wall. In my experience, good programmers will always produce better code than anyone else, regardless of how much information every one has. Another consideration is, what happens when the good coders retire, or sadly, die? All that knowledge is lost to the world, requiring yet another generation to figure it out again. What customers are willing to pay for is the software product, since it presumably provides them with some business benefit. The more business benefit it provides, the more they're willing to pay. Being able to spend more time on producing software that provides that benefit would be a win for the ISVs as well as their customers. </idealism> Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
