[Gvsig_english] FEEDBACK gvSIG 1.9 (BN 1253) -- use of gvSIG in production environment

[silvio grosso]

Hi Simon,

Simon wrote:
>The last thing you want  to do is create a hurdle to the use and spread of what is a great program.

You are totally right.

In my opinion, this hurdle does not concern gvSIG's Spanish speakers.
At present, the Spanish community is the most widespread.
In South-America, gvSIG is also well established.
At present, they are, probably, the most important "target" for gvSIG's developers.
For such gvSIG's Spanish users the documentation is just great.
I would say it is fabulous :-)
There is already a very good manual for the 1.1.2 version.
On top of that, there are plenty of videos on YouTube.

I hope I am wrong, but I suppose it will be difficult to get English speakers "volunteers" for writing tutorials for free.
In this International mailing list there are people coming from everywhere (Germay, Italy, France etc) but only a few English native speakers.
For Sextante, Victor Olaya, is too busy writing code for his software :-)
You can't ask Victor to write English tutorials :-)

When you have a software which is a new-comer in its sector, for its developers, it is really important to have all documentation for free.
Probably, nobody is likely to be willing to pay anything for such a documentation :-)

For most established open-source softwares (Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape, Blender, OpenOffice) there are loads of  tutorials, manuals, videos, which are available for free.
This being said, in my opinion, but maybe I am totally wrong, often, the best manuals are those available by paying for them. 
This is not always true but, in the end, if such books are not good nobody would buy them!
On Amazon, for Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape, Blender, OpenOffice etc there are scores of books available.
Quite probably, their writers are not likely to getting rich by selling them, but, for the end-users, this is not a problem :-)

Downloading tutorials for free is not always the "best" option.
Even though these tutorials are available and comprehensive you have to:
1. Find them on the web and this is sometimes a really time-consuming task.
2. You have to download them.
3. Print them on paper if you want to get the best out of them.
4. Probably, you will end up by grouping all of them in a single entity ("book"), other time-consuming task.
In the end, in my opinion, for an end-user, buying a book on Amazon or, even better, in you book-shop is the better option.
Certainly, it is the quicker. Remember: time is money :-)

If you produce a software (e.g. Photoshop), which is the most important in its sector, it goes without saying that many users are likely to buy a book in order to learn its use.
But, it goes without saying, that they would prefer to have such a book for free :-)

But my question remains, who is the guy willing to write a gvSIG's English book, of  500-600 pages, for free?

Best regards,

Silvio