Wix toolkit finance

To bitch or not to bitch, that is the question...

Hmmm where to start?

Half a decade ago, microsoft essentially abandoned setup tools... for their own operating system.  There was a bit of a zombie effort in Visual Studio with the old installer tools being included then dropped then kind of returned... but it was walking dead.  The politics were against it and they really seemed to want people to move on and only create software for their new app store thing.  So why not kill off another of the essential tools that real people depened on to support their customers?

Anyway,  see the history of my rants on this blog if you are into badly written screeds of bile about how that has poisoned my projects.

Fastforward... abit.  The anointed successor has been the WiX toolset.  Essentially, microsoft have dumped the responsibility onto the open source community to support one of their core platform tools.  Be that as it may... in half a decade, the WiX folk have produced a toolset of command line tools that work.  It handles the insane complexity of the task and integrates with the insane number of toolsets for building windows apps... and the insane number of platform changes that microsoft keep vomiting forth... all for gratis. 

Now, yet again, I am trying to work with WiX and yet again, I have run into the problem that existed every other time I have had the mis-fortune to run into it.... documentation.

It's monumental.  (as in a monument to something that you really wish happened to someone else).  Everything you need to know about the WiX toolset is in there... somewhere but there is no coherency to the knowledge it contains.  You need to self assemble that.

Consider this,  for the best part of a decade, the WiX folk have been hammering away at this problem and their best efforts is documentation of the toolset and schema, one pretty sketchy tutorial, stack overflow discussions and three books.   

Books are an increasingly pointless solution to the problem of knowledge about technical systems.  They are increasingly difficult to publish, useless to update, the quality of publications is falling and the trust that they contain the knowledge you are seeking is falling.  Technical publishers have done this to themselves, but its an emergent phenomenon of the speed of change vs the latency of publishing.  As such, books seem less and less useful.

I think we have passed the point where a static book is the best technology we have for communication of knowledge.  I think this inflection point occurred about 7-10 years ago.  Probably about the time I stopped buying technical books seriously.  I certainly purchased a lot after that... but it was a tapering off period that I didn't yet understand.  Now I look at the prospect of buying and using a book with distaste.  I'm seriously considering disposing of my collection of technical books because of how little use they are to me.  Everything is dated, many are out of date and none are searchable or accessible in the way I currently seek knowledge.   

Am I sad about this?  Perhaps.  Certainly a bit nostalgic,  but the replacements for books are just so much better.  Online, dynamic knowledge bases are simply better for most of the day to day question and answer stuff.  The one thing they usually fail at is what I call, curated knowledge. 

This is very much the core business of academics.  The collection, organisation, dissemination and curation of knowledge about a specific topic.  Where this is done well using accessible digital tools, its brilliant.  The ability to access, update, search, cross reference, annotate and version knowledge in a good system like a wiki or a well structured knowledge base is brilliant.  But its still a massive job. 

I have helped build a number of knowledge bases.  None of them has been simple and none have been financially rewarding.  They are run on passion.  Wikipedia has my respect but I also see its flaws. Good writers can't eat passion. 

I think the problem winds back to the lack of viable mechanisms to identify and reward high quality documentation as part of open source (or any source) tooling. 

I see that FireGiant has started trying to sell a companion product to the WiX toolset. Will this help with the documentation? Kind of burns when you're used to the "free" access model... but the reality is that free is a pretty expensive service to provide.

I know this has been said any number of times before... but there has to be a better way.

Having stated the problem...again.  What's the possible solutions? 

Patreon? Kickstarter? Micropayments? Freemium? Ad-supported? Slave writers?  All of the above?

Everyone seems to be re-inventing the same wheel for similar problems.