Bill H wrote:
Well no, not really.

The help stuff isn't exactly given away. It's bundled with D3, which is
a very different thing. The very least these guys could do is to add an
attribution to Jon Sisk, along with the Raining Data copyright message.

In fact, I rather doubt that Raining Data would have blessed such an
effort. I know I wouldn't in their position. There is a copyright
message on the site, but I have a suspicion that they are themselves
violating copyright by posting this on their website.

Now /that/ is very true indeed. Also, the documentation sometimes gives
information for the Unix versions of D3 which is not true for the NT
version.

Luke

Luke Webber wrote:
(No real points here, just yakkin)

Jon didn't think so. RD was surprised when they found out it was done
too, but later approved it as long as the RD copyrights were in plain
view. That sort of ticks me off too because I was trying for a few
years to get them to approve a similar community documentation project
which I've been talking about among MV colleagues for some years now.
I have full respect for Sierra Bravo but the way this d3ref.com thing
was done was a mistake IMO. That data is sorely out of date and I
don't believe there is any collaboration with RD to bring it up to
date. I'm sure when the new Ref account is made available by RD the
SB site will be updated. In the mean time it's just another source
for the same old stuff.

What never ceases to amaze me is how impressed people are with what
was done. A friend of mine did a VB4 front-end to EPick over 10 years
go, but we sort of laughed it off as one of those things no one would
use - it was just too easy. A web interface to AP Ref is also just
too easy to do - the only thing stopping it was approval from RD.
This GUI stuff isn't rocket science even though lots of Pick people
think it is. All it takes is someone to say they think it should be
done - and maybe someone to cough up some chump change to make it
happen.

T

Tony Gravagno wrote:
Precisely why I said in another post that I wouldn't have given
permission if I'd been in RDTA's place. Let third parties host your
doco, and how do you keep it up to date? Not that up to date doco is one
of RDTA's current interests, or so it seems.

Absolutely. In fact, Jon tells me that he had in mind to produce
something like this (HTML or hypertext) from the start. But I guess Dick
wasn't interested. It's a real shame, IMO, that Dick used this to push
his Update processor, because it could have been done a lot better with
just a little BASIC code instead.

But yes, the conversion to HTML is utterly trivial, and there is no good
reason why it should have been left to a third party. In fact, you could
use OSS tools to convert the Help database to just about any format -
HTML, PDF, what-have-you. Then you'd just maintain the text in one
place, which beats the current setup (books online, PDF and online help).

Luke

Luke Webber wrote:
I know that for at least the last year RD has been very aggressive
about putting together a new D3Ref which is up to date and includes
notes where the *nix and Windows versions differ. They do care about
the doc and want to do a good job with it. Given the massive effort
and their current resources, it remains to be seen whether the new doc
will be properly QA'd. I hope they can pull it off.

T

We absolutely did not launch d3ref.com without FIRST obtaining permission from RDTA. They sent us the exact copyright notice that they wanted to appear on the site and we put that in place as they had asked.

We did this originally for our own development team, then after gaining permission from RDTA launched it for use by the general public.

The d3ref.com site is pulling reference data directly from a running implementation of D3 with the D3ref account loaded. We did not make a copy of the data and load it into the web site. So, as the reference material changes we simply delete the old d3ref account and restore the new d3ref account. The web site is displaying whatever is in that account in real time.

Sierra Bravo is not "managing" the documentation, we're simply publishing what they provide in a different format.

I'm delighted that people are getting some use out of it and that it is providing a valuable service not only to our programmers, but to hundreds of other visitors every day.

Luke Bucklin
President
Sierra Bravo Corporation
http://www.sierra-bravo.com
http://www.d3ref.com

Playing with the D3/NT 7.5 Beta, documentation is MUUUUCH improved -
something to look forward to. heck, it even documents the "ED" option
from Basic debugger that I found by accident last week - wish I had
known about THAT - yeah, I KNOW it is in REF .... obviously I need to
spend moore time RTFM)

"Ross Ferris" wrote:
Yeah, docs are much better and by far make the old ref obsolete.

Just be careful not to violate the ToS for the Beta when commenting.