Re: E-mail notification from AS400 -- RPG400-L

Hi Hans,

I think I might be slightly surprised by your comments.

The magazines are a business. They won't be for long if they don't do
anything to recover costs. I wonder if the obliteration of the trade
magazines would be more helpful for the AS/400 community.

I think I've fairly pointed out that the AS400Network is reasonable and
fair in their pricing structure for a professional membership. It takes
a lot of people a lot of time and it takes hardware and software and
other side dishes to serve the information up.

I think if you were to look at how I spend my time, you'd find that I do
indeed give away much help for free. In fact, the majority of what I do
is either free or done at a very reduced rate. But, Hans, I wonder how
my son is going to able to MIT if I give away EVERYTHING for free. Heck,
I wonder how he's going to do it even with me actually collecting a few
dollars for the work I do! I'm glad he's ambitious, but MIT? KaChing...

You know, Tech Support is my business. I market and offer a technical
support service that is analagous to IBM SupportLine. It would be easy
for me to justify not offering any free help to the community given that
that is my business. But, I do offer much free help, even though it is
the very service on which my livelihood is based.

Given your comments about the guarded protection of information in the
AS/400 community, I guess it's safe for me to ask you to package up the
RPG compiler specifications, along with the compiler's source, so that I
can fiddle around with it and make a couple of enhancements if I so
desire.

Regarding the FAQ - Yes, that's a good idea. How about you get started
on that right away? I'm too busy answering questions for free to put one
together.

In the course of a week, I receive somewhere in the neighborhood of 50
solicitations for free help (and often many more than that). And, most
of these people get help. So, when somebody feels SO entitled to my
expertise and the fruits of my labors, it's a bit irritating to hear a
complaint when you point them to a link containing their answer that
you've ALREADY spent countless hours putting together in the form of an
article so that many can derive benefit. Authors do the research, write
the article; editors edit the article, etc... Much effort... As I'm
confident you know. But if I've written the article and take the time to
respond to somebody needing assistance, saying "Hey, you know what, I'm
kind of busy right now, but I have written an article that you can find
here...", then I don't think it's gracious to complain because there
might be a small amount of effort and/or a small cost involved.

In my career, I've helped people with thousands and thousands of
problems. I've enjoyed it immensely. I can only hope that thousands
appreciated it.

Cordially,

Gary Guthrie





boldt@ca.ibm.com wrote:
> 
> While I have no problem with the idea of being fairly
> compensated for your work, there is a rather large community in
> which people do willingly share their work with others for free.
> You've probably heard about one product that came out of this
> community - Linux.  Much Linux software is available for free,
> along with an almost endless supply of information and help on it
> that's very easy to find on the internet via your favorite search
> tool.
> 
> One of my biggest beefs about the AS/400 community is how much
> information is guarded and protected.  You can't use any of the
> popular search engines (like Google) since the indexing bots
> can't get past the login screens in the AS400Network.com or
> midrangecomputing.com web sites.  I suppose it's mainly a
> financial consideration for these mags, but they may be cutting
> their own throats by making it difficult for people to get to
> the useful information they offer.  The Linux community shows
> that information CAN be shared for free and yet still make
> money for companies.
> 
> It's so bad that, as far as I know, there are still no FAQ's
> publically available on RPG or any other AS/400 topic!
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