I wish software packages had data sheets! It would be great to have a concise/standardized format with bullet points and a "typical applications" section on github landing pages.
Analog Devices and Linear Technology (now owned by Analog Devices) have the cleanest looking datasheets. Texas Instruments is ok but not great. Standard Microcircuit Drawings, the kind of government datasheets used for milspec parts, are absolutely horrendous and should be avoided if the manufacturer has a normal looking datasheet to look at.
Linears are great, I find the AD sheets hard to read sometimes. Microchip historically has some decent ones but it’s been a while since I’ve used their parts.
Datasheets for Japanese connectors are like a circle of hell for me. Confusing and possibly incomplete dimensions, and the drawing usually looks like it was printed, scanned, and converted to jpg several times.
Ugh, I've been using a datasheet from Panasonic [0] recently, and it's been a trip. The original Japanese is all there, with a lackluster English translation below each paragraph. Plugging the Japanese in to Google Translate for the particularly bad sections usually helps. At least this version is clean, I ran across a few PDFs floating around for this part that looked like they had been run though the print-scan-jpeg cycle a few times.
Eait until you see Chinese market only parts without datasheets in English, and thenselves mostly done by not so bright engineers of sales offices of Western big semis.
TI's technical reference manuals for their MCUs are some of the best I've used, though. That's not saying much. But compared to Marvell or NXP/Freescale they're really good.
Cypress PSOC chips have a bunch of software modules you can load into them to implement various functionality, and each piece of such software includes a datasheet, just as if it was a standalone chip. It's glorious.
In "Object-Oriented programming an evolutionary approach", Brad J. Cox (the inventor of Objective-C) hoped for the birth of "software-ICs", software components that should have been widely reusable, and documented with the equivalent of the datasheets used for traditional ICs. This was his vision for OOP.
IC datasheets are dominated by the mundane but critical things like timing diagrams and electrical tolerances. Software components can't even agree on which "ICs" fit into which breadboards.
The problem I have is the sense "you're only allowed to ask for progress or give direction if you code it".
Maybe you're eg a UI/UX expert, you can help plan the direction for a project, feedback the changes needed and why, help make the project a success but just aren't competent enough to code those changes. Sure, no-one owes you their FOSS work, but it seems like we lose something if the only input allowed is from people able to do the coding.
Of course you might also just be a user. If you pay it forward, do you get to make a feature request?? If I don't code it myself ... maybe I should stop being a user if I can't contribute code?
Demanding work for free, and offering suggestions for improvements can be seen as synonymous, but they can actually be vastly different.
Projects I use heavily, like Ubuntu, I try to make myself useful offering advice on forums. That's not putting "money" in the bank of any coders but seems like it's in the spirit of FOSS - contributing what we can to create a better system.
