[CMake] Documentation strategy

[Brandon Van Every]

On 6/20/07, Brandon Van Every <bvanevery at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/20/07, Robert J. Hansen <rjh at sixdemonbag.org> wrote:
> > Brandon Van Every wrote:
> > > They aren't going to buy a book to do an evaluation.
> >
> > They often will.  I can shell out $40, wait a few days for it to arrive
> > and get other paying work done in the meantime, then have enough data on
> > hand to evaluate CMake properly in just the space of a few hours... or I
> > can spend a few days discovering CMake through trial and error and not
> > doing anything to improve the bottom line.
>
> Counting on people to buy books to do evaluations is bad strategy.  If
> anyone in an organization can just grab the docs and read them, they
> will, when prodded by peers.  If you're the only guy with the CMake
> book, and you're waiting for it, and it's about your schedule and your
> ways of masking the shipping delay, and you being an "assigned" person
> to deal with it in the 1st place, there are lotsa extra barriers.

Also, students and other sorts of open source cheapskates do not buy
books.  This is a *huge* segment of the technical community.  One of
the valid strategies for widespread adoption is to hit the students so
that they infect the businesses they go to work at.  You do that by
giving them stuff for free.  Microsoft knows this, that's why they
give out their XNA XBox 360 development stuff and their Visual Studio
2005 Express compiler.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every