Awhile ago, I looked at the LibUSB project, since I wanted to use a custom USB driver for a project. The fact that the driver worked on Linux, OS X and Windows (LibUSB-Win32) was compelling.

I looked for documentation. The documentation for LibUSB-Win32 said, "use the docs for LibUSB." And the web page hasn't been updated since sometime in 2004, leading me to believe that the project is dead.

The docs for LibUSB are a fucking joke. I'm convinced that the only person who can actually use LibUSB is the author.

And their reason for the crappy docs is silly. They're working on a 1.x release of LibUSB but the current "good" version, with the crappy docs, is a 0.x version. And they don't want to update the docs for the 0.x version because the 1.x version will be completely different.

Anyways, SiLabs has a nice general-purpose Windows USB driver, and it's well documented and works. Similarly, Apple's example drivers for OS X work, too.

For every excellent, supported, useful open-source project (Subversion, TortoiseSVN, Apache), there's a hundred crappy, undocumented projects like LibUSB floating around.

The difference between an excellent, useful, compelling open-source project and a piece of shit is often the quality of the documentation. Most people don't want to read the source to figure out how to use something. They just want to use it.

-a