Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Greenpeace: Pay up!

I'm new to developing in the oacs environment and if I were to take this attitude, I would be in for some serious disappointment working with the toolkit. Since ad_form is the piece of code in question let me address that. I've been using it and enjoy working with it. It was a bit of a puzzle at first. I looked at Jon Griffin's docs, went through the code and have gone through much of the forum. It took a bit of effort, but I feel the benefits are well worth the results. Do I have more questions - sure. Are Greenpeace and/or Don responsible for this? Of course not. At the end of the day, I chose to use the code - after all, there are other avenues open to accomplish what I intend. I also chose to use OACS as a development platform for some of my projects - 'nough said.

Much the same case can be made for many parts of the toolkit and sometimes it is very frustrating, but having said that, let me point out that if there is a continous theme that runs throughout this community is that of better documentation. Continous efforts are being made to improve and extend the docs by Joel and many others and this comment seems to imply that is not the case. This is not a very positive thing... Greenpeace is not to blame, gatekeepers are not to blame. I hope that as a community we can do better than misdirected anger and calls for boycotts and such. Does anyone seriously think that any good will come from calling Greenpeace and others out in this manner?? Look, we all need assistance at some point and the more experienced amongst us sometimes have time to help and sometimes don't but in the end we are responsible for the choices we make in developing software - no one else. It is also our responsibility to help the community move forward in whatever way we can. Greenpeace has made contributions already by paying for and releasing software under the GPL. They certainly where not obliged to do that so is it fair to blame them for not reaching a "higher" standard of documentation on this piece of code? Again - no.

I think the suggestions made by Tom are really good and would certainly go a long way towards making the toolkit a lot friendlier. So, I think there is a lot of good, common ground here if we focus on doing what's really important - making the toolkit the very best it can be and not on trying to place blame. Again I know how frustrating it can be sometimes to work through some parts of OACS - but I don't believe a boycott of anything is the answer. If anything, it can have very negative repercusions for the community as a whole - is this really what is desired??