Ionrock Dot Org

Today I am working on a project that integrates with Documentum. One good thing about the project is that I know there is a command line interface, so when it is all said and done, I can make something happen. The downside is there seems to be a .Net interface available that I have no access to at the moment because we have not paid for the developer documentation. This is ridiculous.

I realize that someone down the line felt that they could make good money off of people trying to be experts in their application. Making money is great, but stifling grass roots evangelism and community is anything but desireable with complex applications. Open source projects such as Apache are wildly popular because of great software *and* a great developer community. There are tons of howtos and blogs about setting up Apache to do some trick and that is why it is so successful.

Documentation allows for distributed knowledge when it is free. To use a network metaphor, this reduces bandwidth by pushing request for information to those willing to accept it instead of one source. In some cases it seems reasonable to require payment for an SDK, albeit I don't know of one. But I would never buy an SDK license if I didn't have the chance to read the docs beforehand. How would I know the insanely bloated prices I am paying for a few dlls and a pdf are going to be worth the bits they supply?

This is one great advantage of ePublisher as a platform. The SDK is XSL. There are some extension objects that are WebWorks specific and the model we use is not overly obvious, but the essence is that if you understand XSL, then you have the tools to do whatever you would like with ePublisher. I know we are working documenting and providing more resources (this blog reflects this). I know if anyone gets the bright idea of forcing folks to pay for our docs I will screaming no!