[Catalyst] What a waste of time

[Brandon Black]

On 4/26/06, rails coder <railscoder at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/26/06, Cory Watson <jheephat at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > I am quite interested in why you would label Catalyst as 'consulting
> > ware' then accept paying $22.50 for the Agile Development PDF (which
> > is what I'm assuming you purchased) for Ruby on Rails.  I have nothing
> > against buying a PDF... I think it's a great idea.  I'm just at a loss
> > to explain your rationale.
>
>
>  How about because:
>
>  1. the book exists
>

Fair enough, I'm a fan of a good book, see below at the bottom.

>  2. it only costs 22.50 (you can't even get catalyst devs to laugh at you
> for that price)
>
>  I'm not that cheap, and I would have paid for a decent catalyst book or
> paid somebody to write a decent tutorial, if such book or willing person
> would have been available.  I won't pay somebody several hundred, or even
> more than a thousand dollars, to explain how their poorly documented
> software works when other well documented software is available.
>
>  Asterisk devs are using the same "consulting ware" business model.. the
> documentation is incredibly poor to non-existant, and none of them will
> share their setups with you. There is always this attitude that "I spent
> months/years learning/developing this thing, it doesn't hurt you to spend
> months/years learning how to use it via trial and error/humiliation/newbie
> pecking order/whatever...

Guess what? You didn't buy Catalyst (or Asterisk). It's free.  You
don't like it, you're free to use something else.  It's dubious at
best to lay blame on someone who has offered you a free gift which is
easily refused.

The alternatives to using Catalyst and getting mad about missing
documentation and poor install processes are:

1) Using some other peice of open source software that suits you
better (Rails seems to be it, so I don't see why you're even here).
2) Pay for an equivalent commercial product, if one exists and you can
afford it.
3) Spend some time figuring it out for yourself, with community help
(see next para).
4) Pay someone to figure it out for you.

In return for the gift of this free software, you could even spend
some time writing some documentation and/or helping other new users in
return, so as to better the solution for everyone.  If everyone that
managed to save days and dollars by using a prebuilt open-source
product contributed back even 5% of their time and/or money savings in
whatever way they could, open-source software would improve even
faster than it does today.

And the community is quite helpful.  Most of the traffic on this list
and on the related irc channel consists of people asking good
questions and getting good answers.  Lots of people here are very
helpful.  Lots of devs around here freely share example and real
projects they've built on top of Catalyst as examples.

> When they write a decent book, I will buy it. I
> don't have months of free time to waste learning by trial and error.
>

You still don't get it.  "They" is you.  As a user of a project like
this, you are free to contribute to the project as well.  Not only
could you write some documentation, you could even (*gasp*) write an
entire book on the subject, publish it, and make some money off of it.
 Someone will eventually, and we'd all love that.

Those who make money from Cat-related consulting have no financial
interest in poor documentation or lack of books.  They would prefer
that docs and books exist and are of good quality, to promote
widespread popularity and adoption, which brings more users and more
contributors.  There will always be clients for them that would rather
pay than spend the time to read the books and do it themselves (or
hire those that can).

-- Brandon