[Eric] outdated “Technical Reports”--failure

[Mikhail Terekhov]

On Saturday, November 3, 2018, Studio - PM <studio-pm at hotmail.com
<mailto:studio-pm at hotmail.com>> wrote:

    *>  don't think that you failed*

    *   I'll try to explain why, and in which sense, I evaluate the
    cited “Tech.Reports” as a failure. *


    *Please consider and mentally compare the potential productivity of
    an average Eric IDE user(*) possibly relaying or NOT relaying upon
    the related “Tech.Reports”. Probably incomparable. *


    Well, in spite of such an obvious evaluation, no one of the many
    different User Groups, nor High Tech. tools Producers, nor Tech.
    Writers associations I got in touch with, considered worthwhile to
    take into consideration my independent & fair way of dealing with
    tech. doc., as exemplified with such Eric Tech.Reports. *Most of
    them reacted with indifference, some even expressing annoyance and
    disdain. **In this sense what I intended, and proposed, as a model
    of how-to-do, revealed not convincing enough. In this sense it was a
    failure*
    **


It is sad, but I think you are right, it is a failure. Despite of
quality of the Eric Tech.Reports. I really think the report was great
and I appreciate your efforts. At the same time the failure was almost
inevitable from the very beginning IMHO. From the commercial point of
view Eric is not so widespread piece of software that publishers would
line up for the commercial book about it. The only way one can deal with
it is to help Detlev make Eric even greater :). From the community POV
your model, while having good points like user centricity, it has some
not very appealing property - it is closed source. There are many
disadvantages in this property. Most obvious is what is happening now -
you've lost an ability or interest to continue the project and it is
dead. Another one is that it is hard to keep up with the original
project alone, the report quickly became outdated. If you'd open the
sources of the report and, even better, offered to include it in the
Eric itself, then it would had a chance to live and develop further (and
you'd not feel so solitary :)). Another point is that with open source
projects it is important IMHO not just use the functionality they
provide but also to learn from them and participate in development. In
closed source projects all the fun of development and know-how owner
keeps for himself, leaving users just bug reporting which is not that
fun, IMHO again.
Anyway, thanks for your efforts and good luck in your other endeavors.

Regards,
Mikhail
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