The time-tested market solution to this problem seems to be that a bunch of 1337 hackers create a solid open-source package that you can download for free, then an author comes along, writes a thorough set of documentation for it, and publishes it through O'Reilly for $30 per copy.
Why do people put up with this model? Maybe because nobody expects any better, maybe because $30 is short money for well-written documentation. As a rhetorical question, have you ever worked on a project (open-source or closed, internal or external) where documentation writing was anything other than an after-thought?
Why do people put up with this model? Maybe because nobody expects any better, maybe because $30 is short money for well-written documentation. As a rhetorical question, have you ever worked on a project (open-source or closed, internal or external) where documentation writing was anything other than an after-thought?