[Coco] DriveWire is just a hobby (Was: DW4 on MAc & Linux)

[Tormod Volden]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
>
> On Sep 26, 2013, at 08:58 , Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am not going to assume responsibility for fulfilling anyone's
>> definition of how things should be, I'm simply sharing the results of
>> the hundreds of hours I've put into this project.  If that is not
>> enough to satisfy someone, so be it.
>>
>> If you feel DriveWire is not a "good job" because the documentation
>> doesn't meet your standards, by all means jump in and make the
>> documentation as you'd like it.  Take what we have and improve it to
>> be a "good job" in your view.  That is what open source is about.
>
>
> Aaron, I agree with you 100% on this matter. Releasing an open project for free is a gift to the world, and it does not include any obligation to continue providing free support after the fact. Thank you for your contributions to the community, and please be aware that at least some of us understand the mindset of open source.

+1 and amen.

When I first discovered this CoCo scene, Drivewire, hdbdos, nitros9,
os-9, whatnot, I took me quite some time to get the big picture and
understand what was what, relations and dependencies between them and
so on. I would have loved a 10 line FAQ streamlined for my background
knowledge and experience. But I dived into the existing documentation
and figured it out over time. I accept that nobody had written a
concise documentation that exactly suited my purpose. This is complex
stuff and a lot of stuff. I also did not need to learn everything in
one evening.

It seems like there is the expectation that you can start from scratch
and learn all this in one hour. I found many comments here
entertaining. Complaints about too little documentation, complaints
about too much documentation! Some want everything to be as simple as
in the eighties, when they had one CoCo and one floppy. At the time
they would have to pay half a month salary for anything one tenth as
complex and useful as what they get for free now. Today you can buy a
ready hdb-dos ROM or floppies and Drivewire cable from cloud-9 for
pennies if you want to take the fast path. But instead people complain
that they have to read documentation to make their own.

I am glad people are stepping up to improve the documentation. There
are many people who know (or can learn by themselves) enough to do
that. Aaron is one of the fewer who can actually make this technology
work, so I am glad he spends his precious time on that instead of
writing documentation that other people can write as well.

Tormod