Re: [ndoc-devel] FW: NDoc 2.0 - R.I.P.

[Tim M. <ti...@tl...>]

Well, I think I can state for all of us who were patiently awaiting 2.0 that
this stinks. But whatchagonnado?

 

Anyone want to clue me in to what Sandcastle is?

 

From: ndo...@li...
[mailto:ndo...@li...] On Behalf Of Mark Ingram
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 4:31 AM
To: ndo...@li...
Subject: [ndoc-devel] FW: NDoc 2.0 - R.I.P.

 

I presume many of you have seen this.

 

 

 

From: Kevin Downs [mailto:nd...@kd...] 
Sent: 26 July 2006 18:32
To: nd...@kd...
Subject: NDoc 2.0 - R.I.P.

 

I have decided to discontinue work on NDoc 2.0 and no longer participate in
any open-source development work.

 

The development and release of NDoc 1.3 was a huge amount of work, and by
all accounts widely appreciated. Unfortunately, despite the almost
ubiquitous use of NDoc, there has been no support for the project from the
.Net developer community either financially or by development contributions.
Since 1.3 was released, there have been the grand total of eleven donations
to the project. In fact, were it not for Oleg Tkachenko's kind donation of a
MS MVP MSDN subscription, I would not even have a copy of VS2005 to work
with! 

 

To put this into perspective, if only roughly 1-in-10 of the those who
downloaded NDoc had donated the minimum allowable amount of $5 then I could
have worked on NDoc 2.0 full-time and it could have been released months
ago!  Now, I am not suggesting that this should have occurred, or that
anyone owes me anything for the work I have done, rather I am trying to
demonstrate that if the community values open-source projects then it should
do *something* to support them. MS has for years acknowledged community
contributions via the MVP program but there is absolutely no support for
community projects.

 

Once 'Sandcastle' is released, it is my belief that it will become the
de-facto standard and that NDoc will slowly become a stagnant side-water.
This will happen regardless of technical considerations, even if Sandcastle
were to be less feature-complete. It's just an inevitable result of MS's
'not-invented-here' mentality, one only has to look at Nant and NUnit to see
the effects of MS 'competition'.  

 

This is not, however,  my only reason for stopping development work - I have
a big enough ego to think I could still produce a better product than them
:-)

 

As some of you are aware, there are some in the community who believe that a
.Net 2.0 compatible release was theirs by-right and that I should be moving
faster - despite the fact that I am but one man working in his spare time...

 

This came to head in the last week; I have been subjected to an automated
mail-bomb attack on both my public mail addresses and the ndoc2 mailing list
address. These mails have been extremely offensive and resulted in my ISP
temporarily suspending my account because of the traffic volume. This
incident has been reported to the local authorities, although I am highly
doubtful they will be able to do anything about it.

 

This has was the 'last-straw' and has convinced me that I should withdraw
from the community; I'm not prepared to have myself and my family threatened
by some lunatic!

 

 

Kevin

 

 

P.S. If anyone wants to take over as admin on the SourceForge NDoc project -
contact me. If not, I'll be removing myself in 14 days.