I love open source software. The whole notion of a bunch of guys (well, they are mostly guys, with a few notable exceptions), often spread around the world, collaborating to produce a useful piece of software, often with little or no chance of being properly rewarded for their efforts, gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling.

And there have been some very successful open source projects. I suppose the most famous is Linux. I don’t know how many copies of Linux are out there, but it is well into the millions.

One common problem with open source software is a lack of documentation. The software is developed by programmers, and programmers notoriously hate writing documentation. To overcome this many open source projects have active forums which provide all kinds of good advice to novices.

Unfortunately, far too often, the answer to a question is along the lines of RTFM. Computer geeks all love acronyms and for anyone out there who is not part of the cognoscenti, RTFM stands for Read The F***ing Manual. This is lousy advice in most cases for a number of reasons. Often the precise information is difficult to find, and in many case there just isn’t a FM to FR.

All this arose the other day when I decided that I had to get my business site up and running properly again. At the moment it is an old static HTML site that I built some time ago, and now many of the links are broken. Previously the site was running Xaraya, possibly one of the best Content Management Systems around, and itself an open source project.

I could have gone back to Xaraya, and I may, in fact, do that. However, I thought that I might look at what else was around, just to get some experience in other CMSs, and it is always good to have a knowledge of a number of systems so as to be better able to advise clients. The other thing is that Xaraya is very big and very powerful, and it may be overkill for what I want. My business site will be much more static than this blog.

One that I looked at was Etomite. Now this looks to be a pretty good CMS. But all CMS run a bit differently and so I looked at the documentation. A lot was missing. That’s OK, it is open source and they have forums, or is that fora?

Here is what I found on the forums. A user who is described as an Etomite newbie, and so obviously in need of help asked:

Where can I download templates for etomite?

The answer from one of the founders of Etomite –

Ummm – silly question, but did you actually look where you are posting?

And another user asked how he or she could install the templates. A reasonable question, I would have thought. The answer given by the same co-founder –

I suggest you read the Etomite Documentation

Now I followed the link to the supposedly helpful Etomite Documentation and found nothing that would help the enquirer.

I will now tell you another story. I use an O/R mapper for database application development. The one I use is LLBLGen Pro. This, in its original form, was an open source project. It is now a commercial product, although very reasonably priced. It has hundreds of pages of documentation, but just in case that’s not enough, it, too, has a very active forum.

The developer of LLBLGen Pro, Frans Bouma, never writes RTFM replies to queries. Sometimes he refers to the documentation, but everytime the link is to the specific page in the documentation that is relevant to the question. And very rarely is that reference the only answer given. Let me give you an example. A user had a problem and said –

I discovered some strange behaviour in my application. etc etc

He then went on to describe the behaviour. There followed a number of posts from the user and Frans as they tried to find the cause of the strange behaviour. After 18 posts the user said –

It was my mistake. Problem solved

What did Frans do? Rip his hair out. Perhaps, he lives in Holland and maybe they do that there. However, he replied –

ok, I’m glad it’s solved now.

This was not an isolated incident. It happens all the time. And of course, the post was not a waste of time for other readers, we all learnt something new about the product.

I will continue to use LLBLGen Pro, and soon I will upgrade to version 2, as soon as it is released, which will be very soon, the beta is out and looks very good. Upgrading will cost me money, but money well spent.

As much as I like the look of Etomite, and even though using it will cost me nothing, I think I will leave it alone. I can do without the attitude.