My mind came right back to this excellent developer.* article by Steve Benz, "Stunted Growth: Subsidies and Stagnation in the Software Tools Market [1]" after I encountered this post on the SitePoint Blogs [2], which in turn points to this news that the creator of the great NDoc tool [3] 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 [4] 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 [5] 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.