Wednesday, July 26, 2006

The Ugly Side of Open Source

Kevin Downs has stopped work on NDoc 2.0, because of a lack of support from the community and because of the dumbass treatment he’s received from idiots who 1) never contributed any support to NDoc and 2) felt they were entitled to a new release supporting .NET 2.0.

Read a bit on Charlie Chen’s blog for a detailed e-mail from Kevin talking about the bottom line, including some true jackass behavior by folks who decided the right way to speed development on NDoc 2.0 was to automate e-mail spam bombs to Kevin’s e-mail addresses.  Way to go, guys!  Your smart actions certainly got the desired result, no?  (That was sarcasm, BTW.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Jim

Don't you think that the real reason might be Microsofts "Sandcastle"? Which is by now already labelled the NDoc killer?

Cheers

Gabriel

Jim Holmes said...

No, I don't think Sandcastle is the real reason. I've corresponded with Kevin a couple times about NDoc while I was writing about the tool for my book.

Kevin acknowledged that Sandcastle was an issue on the horizon, but seemed to indicate his main line of frustration was the lack of community support and the idiotic attitude of some NDoc users. (Idiotic is my word, not his.)

Look at how strongly NUnit and NAnt are going -- both of which have corresponding tools from MS. Neither is in danger of going under simply because of competition from MS-based tools.

Anonymous said...

Having seen some of the early screenshots of Sandcastle, I'll have to say that NDoc as at least two generations/iterations ahead of Sandcastle from a usability standpoint.

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