Brenton House

its sad but I agree with Kevin, whats the point of spending time on a project were he doesnt get any support or donations. Its not the first project like this that sadly ends and I wonder how long other projects like for example fckeditor will last without finding a viable commercial alternative instead of going to die in the long run when the developer will have better things to do.

What's bad is that if Kevin would have choosen a commercial atlernative he might have come with an even greater product than ndoc is now, and who knows he would have been the next sandcastle from MS ...

Indéniablement, NDoc 1.3 est un outil Open Source qui a connu un grand succès auprès de la communauté...

Kevin Downs, développeur de NDoc 2.0, a annoncé la fin de son implication dans le projet... entrainant...

Disheartening email.  

Such great work and appreciated by many.  I know our company would have gladdly paid a licensing fee for the software if it were required.  

If you release something for free it is generaly not good form to expect payment or be offended by lack there of.  And if you think lack of donations equals lack of appreciation then perhaps you should instead look at the number of people that are using it.

Please dont take my comments as a lack of appreciation for one of the better open source projects out there.  I simply want to point out that had he desired to make money from the his hard work then money could have been made (something I am all for).

Contributing a donation for a development tool is rather hard to deal with accounting wise especialy when you have to explain your budget to higher ups.    

NDoc is increadibly useful for large development teams and for code management, as such we probably would have paid a decent amount for a product like this.

Sad for Kevin.

I've tried document compiler from Microsoft, but in my opinion, it generates a document worse than NDoc2.

I tried sandcastle today and it's pretty poor compared to the NDoc 2.0 alpha that has been floating around. Sandcastle doesn't emulate the look and feel of the VS2005 docs as closely as NDoc 2.0 was doing which is kind of odd when it's comming from Microsoft. Come back Kevin! Anyone who doesn't have a good word to say about your efforts must be a nutter!

According to this blog post the NDoc project is over - there is no NDoc 2.0 on the horizon. This is bad...

This is really sad. I think the problem really is the Microsoft developer community. The concept of open source is so foreign, that they hear "free software" and think, "wow, I can get free (as in beer) software without paying a dime!!" The thought of contribution monetarily or with code never enters their mind. The other problem is that Microsoft would never think of contributing to something like this. Instead they just cherry-pick the best ideas and create their own crappy "invented-here" version, and every PHB will want to go with that instead of some "dirty hippy's" project. You really do have to ask yourself why the Java open source developer community is thriving while the .NET community is just a pale imitation....it has nothing to do with the technology...

which damage , I loved NDOC :(

Microsoft has recently annouced a new MSDN style documenting tool they codenamed Sandcastle... Those

Speaking as a shareware author of many years standing I believe it's hard enough getting customers to pay for shareware which times out after a given time period. With a product like NDoc released as donationware I'm really not surprised to find that it hasn't raised the shekels. You got into double figures. Wow! That's above what I would have estimated. Also, in my long experience in the industry the people I've found least likely to "buy" software licenses are software developers. They either have to have their employer buy it for them (most won't as they can't see the value it would add to the delivery chain), or their magical status of being a software developer means they should get it for free. Software developers somehow want to be paid for their work, but never want to pay for someone else's in the same line of business. I have even witnessed software developers spend hours on the internet looking for crack codes rather than buy a $30 license. I am the only software developer I know who has ever bought a shareware license. And in the last couple of months I have spent a couple of hundred bucks on new shareware products which I needed - my own money, I am a regular employee these days. I see something which will help me, it is relatively inexpensive (that is, within my personal budget), I buy it. I then invariably get quizzed by my co-workers to let them have a copy of that great product so that they can make use of it - naturally as a free gift to them because they cannot possibly put their hand in their own pocket. I refuse point blank to share license codes with anyone. Sorry to hear about this demise Kevin. I know how it feels to devote hundreds of hours and see nothing in return. I didn't contribute to NDoc because I couldn't get the darn thing working with .NET v2. If I had managed to do so there would have been a guaranteed contribution from me. Anyway, your family is far more important than the labour of love that a product like NDoc is so you've made a good decision.

From what I have seen of Sandcastle so far, NDOC2 is much better

Después de la muerte prematura de NDOC 2.0 Microsoft ha liberado una utilidad que 'lo sustituye',

Here's what I don't get: why not take NDoc proprietary? Charge US $29.95 for it. Who wouldn't pay that for NDoc?

If you want to get paid, you have to put a price on the product. If it's "pay if you want to", who wants to pay?

If you put a price on it I will buy it immediatly even if it would be $100 as I use it within my company.

Unfortunately, many people won't offer any support. I never saw the donate link on NDoc page.

TO: Kevin Downs

Please, Please bring back NDOC in some form, I used it, I loved it and I would gladly pay $29.99 - $99.99 for it!!!!!! Screw MS and their inferior products.

Products like NUNIT and NANT and NDOC are much better then the tools they are offering.

Regards,

Blaze6947

We still use the NDoc 2.0 alpha and it works well for our purposes. Sandcastle is not a solution for us, because we need the HTML Help 2 format to integrate our help with VS 2005.

As a tool manufacturer, we did what a tool manufacturer does: We asked Kevin, if he could imagine a business model to develop and sell NDoc as a commercial product. We got no answer.

I also wonder, why Kevin doesn't make the sources of the NDoc 2 alpha available to the public -- it would be an affordable amount of work to complete the work.

Please kevin if you read this, EMAIL me to thomas _at_ frostinnovation.no and I guarantee you that we'll manage to pick the threads up in a way you would be able to earn MONEY on this...!! ;)

.t

To Kevin: You're a whiny bitch.  Simply put, if it's money you wanted, then you should have made it a requirement to pay for it.  I would have a bought a license.  My company would have too (in fact I can guarantee it).  If you expect to be compensated for your work, then demand compensation.  Don't whine about how the reality 'should be' unless you're going to actively do something about it.  Which, obviously, you are not.  Typical "blame the world for your own stupidity" nonsense.

"Dave said:  

This is really sad. I think the problem really is the Microsoft developer community. The concept of open source is so foreign, that they hear "free software" and think, "wow, I can get free (as in beer) software without paying a dime!!" ... *whiny open source propaganda drivel removed*"

To the whiny Open Sores twerps:  This is the fundamental flaw in the license(s).  It states that one can't copy the code in a GPL'd app without distributing source and so on.  But really, exactly -WHEN- has this been tested successfully (i.e. WITHOUT a settlement)?  The burden of proof must lie with the original developer.  Sure you might get lucky and get some dumbass who's just going to copy verbatim, but what if they read the code and copy the general algorithm, or perhaps a block of code within a function and strip out comments, or strip out said code and improve upon it?  PROVE that it's yours.  Clearly you can't beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Whine all you like about others copying code.  But fuck, that's what software development has been since its inception.  Get over it.  If you're stupid enough to release the source to the world and/or competition, then don't whine when everyone else pretty much duplicates/improves your work.  Frankly that fat dirty fuck of a hippy Richard Stallman is one of the dumbest people I've ever seen, and no one should take him seriously, he's an annoying idiot who'd be the ruin of the industry if he had his way.  If he doesn't like how the system works, he should move to a place that has a system that's more agreeable to his position.  Perhaps China?  Seriously, stop complaining about how the open source community is being ripped off.  What did you expect to happen?  You're dumb, your competition is not (clearly you've forgotten one of the cardinal rules of software development: Never reinvent the wheel. The competition obviously hasn't).  Simple enough?

You may not like what I have to say or how I say it, but this whole reliance on 'the buddy system' or putting your faith in people to 'do the right thing' is noble, and nice, but when people fail your moral tests, don't bitch and moan.  Suck it up, and deal with it.

In working with my company's offshore developers, I was tasked with providing them documentation on a

It's sad to see the demise of NDoc, as having healthy competition is good for the whole market. Since 2001 I've been building a range of code documentation utilities including one for the .NET Framework.

I started by writing a code documentation tool for classic ASP while I was unemployed for several months after losing my job in the dotcom crash of 2001. It gave me a glimmer of hope in what were pretty desparate times.

While I would love to give my efforts away for free, the reality is I live in the most expensive country in the world and I have to pay the rent and buy food and stuff. Over the years I have put at least $50,000 worth of effort into my just my .NET documentation utility alone - trust me code documentors are not the most exciting or glamorous things to write, and building something that will work with potentially everybody's source code is a huge undertaking.

Speaking from experience, most of the people who use documentation tools are working for medium to large enterprises who charge their clients 1000's of dollars for their code. The cost of a $100 documentation tool is small change for them. By charging for my efforts I am also able to offer support, and I have an incentive to keep the tool up to date as new .NET Frameworks are released.

Having said all that, I doubt that many people could make a living from documentation tools as the market just isn't big enough. I don't make nearly enough money to work on it full time, and I don't have an office, accountant, marketing manager, secretary or comfy chair...

I'm looking for a new niche!

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