More Tool Stagnation to Come?
My mind came right back to this excellent developer.* article by Steve Benz, "Stunted Growth: Subsidies and Stagnation in the Software Tools Market" after I encountered this post on the SitePoint Blogs, which in turn points to this news that the creator of the great NDoc tool has not only abandoned development on it, but is also no longer going to participate in Open Source.
The adjectives from these three sources go together well: stunted, stagnated, subsumed, chilling.
One of the most telling aspects of the story of NDoc creator Kevin Downs is that Microsoft did not even see fit to support someone who was developing a key tool that was already very popular. Kevin writes:
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!
And "wwb_99" writes in the aforementioned SitePoint blog post:
A major part of the reason for Kevin's retirement is the announcement of the Sandcastle project—a yet-to-be-released .NET 2.0 only documentation compiler eerily similar to NDoc. Well, with the major difference that the writers of Sandcastle are receiving Microsoft paychecks and the project has the full support of the Microsoft machine. It is a rather unfair competition.
This does not bode well for Windows-oriented Open Source, and goes a long way to explain why even 5 years after the release of the framework, .NET-based Open Source has never taken off in a significant way. Projects like NDoc and Dot Net Nuke have been the exception, and now one wonders if independent, non-Microsoft-sponsored projects of any size can make it long term.
It's hard to ignore, though, the aspect of this that is hard to blame on Microsoft alone: lack of community support (at least as compared to non-Microsoft-oriented Open Source projects, which are often thriving communities unto themselves). wwb_99 writes:
This raises a few very interesting issues. First, I like many developers, used NDoc, and a number of other open source projects without giving back a dime or a minute of my time. This practice really needs to stop as we will see more and more sad announcements as developers and maintainers tire of giving thanklessly.
I have count myself guilty in this area also; I wonder if it's because my use of NDoc was primarily for my full time job, where I'm being paid to develop applications for the Windows platform. By contrast, outside of work, I am for example an avid Drupal user, and have tried to do my part to support that project with my money and time in solidarity with the many people who work hard on development, testing, documentation, etc. for Drupal.
Thanks for reading,
Dan
Update: It's worthwhile to note that Dot Net Nuke creator/maintainer Joe Brinkman contributed this comment to the SitePoint post's discussion thread. He does not share a negative outlook:
I have been working on DotNetNuke for more than 3 years now and we are stronger than ever even though Microsoft has added in several portal related features to ASP.Net 2.0 and is almost ready with MOSS 2007. While some people may shift to those other platforms, we still have a strong following that continues to grow every day. And if someone takes over NDoc development, I am sure it will remain the top documentation generation tool for a long time to come, no matter what Microsoft comes out with.
SharpDevelop?
Is anyone familiar with this? There's a freely downloadable ebook on APress's site about it. Wikipedia describes it like this: "SharpDevelop is a free and open source IDE for the C#, Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) and Boo programming languages."
Only Generally Familiar
I have been aware of this project for awhile, but since I only do Windows at work, I have not tried it myself. I hope, though, that they are finding an audience to keep it going. It's a great idea, especially given the costs associated with Visual Studio.
If anyone is interested in doing an interview with the SharpDevelop people, and perhaps also with the Dot Net Nuke people or other Windows open source projects, I would be interested in publishing an article on the topic on the developer.* web site.
Dan
Open Source for Government
Working in government, we have the distinction that since our code is developed and paid for by public dollars, other government agencies can request it and we are obliged to provide it...free. (We can charge the cost of a CD or some nominal admin fee.) We have given some of our nicer home-grown Windows applications to other counties with less funded IT departments. The trouble is, one inevitably spends an inordinate amount of time explaining, troubelshooting, etc. for these other entities...time one just cannot spare. If it weren't for that dynamic, I have long thought there should be a central place for government to post references and downloads for easy sharing. There are 100 counties in NC and there are 50 states. (And we're not even talking about city government entities!) Imagine the duplicated effort. (I believe there have been some attempts at setting something like this up, but have yet to see one that was thriving.)
This was proposed by Al Gore
A read write repository of software was proposed by Al Gore. I'd prefer that a software wiki, or other form of wiki, was sponsored by my government or the United Nations to the current wikipedia, which was sponsored by a right-wing commodities broker, because the emotional climate of wikipedia is white American male, and alternative voices are shouted down by a construction of "neutral point of view" which in some real cases reduces to "the white male point of view".
I believe the government could also vend conformant software for government reporting tasks such as free income tax filing software usable from workstations in public libraries.
As it is, some tasks in government reporting are Sysyphean. For example, because non-military expatriates vote Democratic, the current Administration and the State department seem to be making it almost impossible for non-military expatriates such as myself to register to vote, and I wasn't able to vote in 2004.
I've registered with the US consulate and should be getting email about how to register to vote but I'm not getting any.
What is the future of open source on Windows?
I think Microsoft's willingness to let community .NET open source projects die -- and to approach the .NET open source community with an attitude of embrace, extend, exterminate is alarming. It's an issue that could be as important to our future as Net Neutrality.
I responded in more detail on my blog.
Open Source and M$
The open-source/non-open-source divide is really interesting to me. In reality there are many many development platforms out there. The Java world is not the C world is not the Perl world in many ways. But in even more ways these are all in the same world--the open-source world. Microsoft seems to stand alone in the non-open source world. Of course, that's a pretty big world in itself.
Java itself is not an open source tool (much to the chagrin of many a purist). But it fits neatly into the open source culture and the bulk of the 3rd party tools I use are open source and nearly all of them are free! I've often wondered why the MS world is so different.
In many ways the Microsoft/Java divide among developers reminds me of the loyalty of truck drivers to their particular corporate brand. I have this little idea that someone should make one of those fake Calvin bumperstickers with "Calvin" peeing on the MS logo (or the Java logo). Among developers there is a lot of tribalism.
I wonder, though, if there is something in the personalities of developers who tend to go MS vs. those who tend to go Java/C/Perl/Linux that makes the latter camp more likely to embrace open-source and the former camp less likely. Obviously there is great variety among personalities in any large group, but I wonder if, as a general trend, if there's something to that. Or is it a top-down thing, as Dan suggests, with Microsoft squashing or not supporting any MS-related open source ventures and Sun, IBM, and many others bending over backwards to provide exactly that sort of support. Could it just be as simple as the fact that managers are willing to pay for Microsoft tools but not for non-Microsoft tools?
Whatever the cause, it's too bad that Microsoft and .Net developers have missed out on the open-source bandwaggon. It's a pretty neat world and one I've taken a lot from and given a whole lot back to.
By the way, I think lack of support from or even direct competition with a major corporation is no reason to give up an OS project. I never got any help with SourceJammer from any deep pockets (though I did from many helpful people in the community) and there are several version control systems out there with big backers. That never stopped me from moving forward with the project, and SourceJammer certainly found its niche. The only reason I'm more or less retired from it now is because I'm busy with other things.
I know of two excellent open-source and free .NET tools that I've used myself but that I've never heard a "real" .NET guy comment on. The tools are Nant (a build script tool) and NHibernate (an object-relational mapping tool). Of course, both are off-shoots of extremly popular Java open-source tools (Ant and Hibernate). Do these get any attention in the .Net world, or are they only the sort of things a Java developer would turn to when forced into a .NET project?