87 karma · joined August 1, 2022
See, e.g., https://docs.arc42.org
Apart from one of the founders (me) being German, it's no "German thing", but hopefully helpful to all kinds of systems.
https://docs.arc42.org and https://faq.arc42.org
both are free to use and hosted on public repos on Github.
arc42 has been used in practice since 2004. The newest version 8.0 has been released Febr. 2022.
We incorporated user feedback (plus our own experience in real-time, embedded, data warehouse and e-commerce systems)..
(I'm one of the authors of arc42)
(I'm the author of arc42, so I'm biased).
arc42 proposes ONLY a high-level documentation/communicatin structure, and is notation agnostic: I've often used it with UML, and with informal box-and-lines diagrams.
I've written about requirements for docu-tools https://www.innoq.com/en/articles/2022/01/principles-of-tech...
In short: You need text + diagramming tools. Go as light as possible, start small (draw.io and Markdown/AsciiDoc). Use high-end modeling tools (like Enterprise Architect or ArchiMate only in larger teams and/or with formal documentation requirements (20+ devs). Have a look at docToolchain.
it has been translated to EN, ES, DE, NL, IT and UA
it's available for AsciiDoc, Markdown, docx, textile, Confluence and numerous other technical formats.
many examples, hints and tips on https://docs.arc42.org
They will use usage-data to optimize their commercial offerings, they will try out features in non-critical (aka: free) accounts first - so not to offend the paying customers.
In some cases (e.g. free web-mailers like gmx, Instagram, FB etc) the free versions are mainly vehicles for advertising.
Why should Oracle be any different? I cannot see their motivation to offer anything for free... they are *only* money-driven.