"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2745203.NQp32mxg17@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> __/ [ The Ghost In The Machine ] on Monday 11 December 2006 19:51 \__
>
>> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
>> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>> | By writing 6000 pages, something else strikes many, including myself:
>>> | no human can implement that. In fact, nobody aside Microsoft will be
>>> | able to rightly implement it because Microsoft is the only one can
>>> | deal with the previously existing formats. For these 6000 pages are
>>> | thousands of man/years of confusion, users' lock-in, con-formating
>>> | of data, IP and jealously kept trade secrets. And you would expect
>>> | that anybody might come up with something that works? Apple, by
>>> | the way, will not. Because Microsoft Office for Mac will not be
>>> | able to use Open XML for some years, as I have learned. So good
>>> | for the great open file format of Microsoft. 6000 pages cannot
>>> | be a standard. It is FUD. It is a scandal, and a digital wart
>>> | in the industry. 6000 pages cannot be reputed conformant by
>>> | anybody else than their author. And their author is Microsoft.
I have to disagree with this. 6000 is bad, but it's not so bad that "no
human can implement that". I have been pretty much singlehandedly working on
the implementation of a collection of specification documents that together
total up to 1829 pages. It might take a couple of months or so, but I'm sure
the FOSS community will have no problem implementing this 6000 page
standard, especially since they will be collaborating and contributing all
the work back into the FOSS community.
[...]
> the truth is that they had technical writers...
> probably glancing at the code and formalising the algorithms. Speaking of
> working in reverse... code -> spec.
>
> What a hoax.
Actually, a lot of software development (even open source development)
happens this way. If you head over to SourceForge, most of the "popular"
projects usually have documentation/specs/etc. only because someone
volunteered (or was hired) to write them after the code was written. In the
smaller projects, you usually won't find any documentation at all (the
source code *is* the documentation).
Probably the reason for this is that (depending on what the product
actually does -- i.e. this probably isn't true if your product is an IDE
like Eclipse), most users of the products are not programmers themselves,
and so there's more demand for feature, bug fixes, etc., and less demand for
well documented code. I suspect most users of FOSS never bother to actually
read the source code. They appreciate the freedom of having access to the
source code, but they rarely actually take advantage of that right.
- Oliver
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