On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:24:20 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 4/19/2011 14:19, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> I kinda agree with you on this point - a lot of development is done in
>> a very collaborative way, so those who could/want to improve tend to
>> not work in isolation, but as part of a team that has ongoing
>> communication.
> 
> Bringing someone up to speed on the internals of a project that has no
> internal documentation is extremely time consuming.

Sure, but that's different than poor end-user documentation, that's what 
I'm saying.

>> In that respect, OSS isn't much different from closed-source
>> development (at least not in my experience).  Closed-source software is
>> developed before documentation is completed - documentation tends to
>> start being written when the product is installable, because the
>> screens (for example) tend to change before release.
> 
> End-user documentation, yes. But most of the OSS projects are released
> before there's any internal documentation either.  Usually even worse.

Most OSS projects rely on code as the internal documentation.  Which I 
don't necessarily think is a good thing since not everyone codes in the 
same style (though it helps when a project has coding style guidelines, I 
think).

Jim

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