On Wed, 15 Sep 1993 15:46:45 PDT "Dwight M. McCann" <[log in to unmask]> said: >I would certainly expect that if we are paying for a Program Product >that effort would be directed to its support, in terms of documentation, >prior to development of new platforms. The only problem, of course, is that 10 sites dropped out over the summer. That's $33,250 we won't collect for sure. At first I thought this was because people usually wait until the summer to make major changes - that 10 sites is what was going to be lost this year. Unfortunately, we're in September and I keep being informed of impending removals for October and November. Aside from the direct impact, people who have plans to get rid of VM (meaning 80-90% of our customers) aren't going to pay for LISTSERV if they are not convinced they'll have a VMS or unix version soon. >Hell, Eric, contract the documentation for the VM versions out to Ben if >you're under pressure to develop new code. Money is not the issue here, and no matter what happens the documentation will not be written by me, because that's just not something I'm good at, not to mention efficiency. The problem is the amount of time I will have to spend working with technical writers rather than writing code. The EARN documentation plan gave me a concrete example of what it takes to simply proofread a document written by a technical person with years of experience with the network and VM, but who doesn't know LISTSERV by heart. I wrote a thousand lines of mail and spent countless hours reading and re-reading and re-re-reading and finally realizing it didn't help for me to read any more, because I was too used to the text and would not spot mistakes any longer. And that's for just one document of 35 pages, and again the author was a network expert, if not a LISTSERV expert. This isn't to say L-Soft won't write documentation, but the amount will depend on our ability to find a setup not requiring the programmers to spend too much time working with technical writers, especially if they aren't in the same city and this translates to thousands of lines of mail. We can't allow documentation to slow down development because if we do, there won't be anyone willing to buy our nice documentation when it is ready :-) And, of course, "hire more LISTSERV experts" is sooner said than done. Most already have a good job, many don't want to work with documentation, and technical people in general are not good at writing documentation for users who don't know anything about computers (which is why L-Soft's documentation coordinator is a genuine user - you know, the type that looks at a perfectly reasonable manual and says "This is awful!!! I don't understand a thing!!!!!" :-) ). >Dwight (Another not yet paying customer complains about lack of > documentation for a not yet purchased Program Product!) McCann Hmm... Maybe I should point out something. You are not going to pay for LISTSERV, but for LISTSERV software updates and customer assistance. You got a free, indefinite right to use license from me when you first ordered the software, valid until you leave BITNET (or until BITNET dies). In other words, it's not fair to complain that L-Soft's top priority is not writing documentation as soon as possible given that people are now required to pay for the software, because in this respect you are not a paying customer. You will be paying for new versions, between-release fixes and customer assistance, which logically would include documentation updates (for new functions and the like), but you have still not paid for the base product (which would include the initial documentation). If we charged for the right to use and everyone paid, we would collect a bit less than $2M, and with that kind of money I can't imagine how we could fail to convince enough LISTSERV experts to get a better job and enough technical writers to work 25h a day so you can get the full documentation in 3 months :-) Eric