Allow me to respond to answer the questions at hand. 1. The ThoutReader is not supported by any PHP editors. That is true. We foolishly presented the ThoutReader over six months ago to the PHP documentation group before we completed and refined it. Our goal is to make the ThoutReader popular for developers by improving documentation for everyone. In doing so, it will be good for the entire community, PHP included.
2. The ThoutReader has only been downloaded by ~ 400 people. Quite frankly, we consider that a huge success. OSoft consists of two people, Gary Varnell and me. We spend the majority of our time parsing free content than promoting it. The word is getting out and we would like your help to do so. 3. We are not a Java-based commercial web service. OSoft's website was written in PHP. The ThoutReader can be downloaded from OSoft, SourceForge, or any other site that wishes to distribute it. The more the better. With our creation tools, we want any developer to be able to distribute their content from wherever they wish. That is all part of the GPL. The ThoutReader also does not require connectivity once the content is downloaded. 4. ThoutReader is TM. This is true. Some applications control the use of the name through the licensing agreement. We did not do that because our original license was off the mark and was not a true OS license. Gary and I have spent 2 1/2 years designing and building the ThoutReader and we did not want someone to "steal" our name. If we could do it over, we would probably change that. 5. PHP community is not a market place. The ThoutReader doesn't have to be either. Any content that is free we give away free. We also provide tools for authors (perhaps some of the PHP editors?) to write and distribute content if they wish. They can give it away free or charge whatever they want. We happen to believe that an author who writes a book that sells for $49.00 ought to get more than $2.00 for his/her efforts. What do you think? The ThoutReader can be distributed from any website - no restrictions and can be used to display any content without restriction. Although that sounds like a marketplace, I don't consider that bad. If the PHP documentation team will not accept a new open source format that allows developers to browse, search, bookmark, and append all of their open source content, why does PHP offer Microsoft's CHM format as an alternative to HTML? The ThoutReaderT is just as fast and more robust than .CHM and we are open source. Gary and I are not trying to commercialize or take advantage of PHP's good name. The majority of our content is free. The commercial content we do distribute for authors does not even come close to paying the bills. We are committed to improving open source documentation and the ThoutReader is our contribution. We have to earn your respect and we have not done that yet. We need your help. At the very least, we would like to have a link to our PHP formatted documentation from PHP. Our parser is totally automatic and we wish to give that to PHP. Hopefully, PHP might consider supporting the ThoutReader format. Thanks, Mark Mark D. Carey President OSoft, Inc. 253-284-0475 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2511 South Hood Street Tacoma, WA 98402 -----Original Message----- From: Gabor Hojtsy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2005 6:13 AM To: Derick Rethans Cc: techtonik; Mark D. Carey; 'PHPdoc'; 'Zak Greant' Subject: Re: [PHP-DOC] RE: REVISION COMPLETE: Thout Reader Update and Link on PHP >>Me personally don't feel like adding this kind of format into official >>site distribution, because: >> >>1. It is not supported by any PHP editors >>2. It is not very popular (only about 400 people downloaded it so far) >>3. It is integrated with Java based commercial web-service (at least >>it seems to be so) >>4. ThoutReader is (TM) and >>5. PHP community is not a marketplace > > I second that. But you don't have problems with adding a link on the download-docs.php page, right? Goba
