Recent Posts
NDoc: The Death of a (great) Open Source Project
On a related note, it's going to take a while (6 months to a year?) for Microsoft to really get Sandcastle to the point where Kevin Downs got NDoc. Will this new tool be as rich and useful? Or will it be forgotten like HTML Help Workshop?
Recently Kevin Downs, the leader of NDoc, emailed a NDoc folks announcing that NDoc is dead. I was shocked to get this email, but sadly, not surprised. Here's an important part of his email:
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.
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For "base of the pyramid" fundamental stuff like Build, Test, Coverage, Docs, will we pay for them? We should. Should we have given the NDoc project $5? Did NDoc help me personally and my company? Totally. Did I donate? No, and that was a mistake. I agree with Phil. Support those 5, 10, 20 truly Open Source projects with a little of your time or money.
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Open source software is at its best when you aren't obligated to do anything at all other than use it.
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You definitely shouldn't have to pay for it.
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Personally, as an Open Source project co-leader, I'd much rather folks who use DasBlog pick a bug and send me a patch (unified diff format) than give money. I suspect that Kevin would have been happy with a dozen engineers taking on tasks and taking on bugs in their spare time.
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Contributing code to an open source project is a far greater extravagance than any monetary contribution could ever be. It's also infeasible for 99 percent of the audience-- those who have both the time and the ability-- which makes it an even more extravagant demand.
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If contributing money is foolish and contributing code is an extravagance, what's a poor user to do? Nothing. Nothing at all, that is, other than use the software.
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The highest compliment you can pay any piece of open source software is to simply use it, because it's worth using. The more you use it, the more that open source project becomes a part of the fabric of your life, your organization, and ultimately the world. Isn't that the greatest contribution of all?
i wrote about these issues in my article on donationware, "When Do Users Donate":
https://www.donation...icles/One/index.html
if you back up from your conclusion and simply ask yourself the question: "*IS* contributing money foolish" - i'm not sure youd often come up with an answer of yes. in fact you might come to the conclusion that donating $5 to an open source project you love, if many people did it, would enable a few developers to quit their day jobs and improve the quality, reliability, documentation, of the projects.
isn't it at least feasible that widespread acceptence of a donation-based approach to funding open source projects, if we all took it seriously, could make it possible for open source coders to spend more time polishing their software and working on some of the finishing touches that many of us bitch about (lack of docs, etc.)?
Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched off history’s biggest experiment in collaborative knowledge
by Marshall Poe
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Several months ago, I discovered that I was being “considered for deletion.” Or rather, the entry on me in the Internet behemoth that is Wikipedia was.
For those of you who are (as uncharitableWikipedians sometimes say) “clueless newbies,” Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. But it is like no encyclopedia Diderot could have imagined. Instead of relying on experts to write articles according to their expertise, Wikipedia lets anyone write about anything.
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Yet Wikipedia has a value that goes far beyond the enjoyment of its contributors. For all intents and purposes, the project is laying claim to a vast region of the Internet, a territory we might call “common knowledge.” It is the place where all nominal information about objects of widely shared experience will be negotiated, stored, and renegotiated. When you want to find out what something is, you will go to Wikipedia, for that is where common knowledge will, by convention, be archived and updated and made freely available. And while you are there, you may just add or change a little something, and thereby feel the pride of authorship shared by the tens of thousands of Wikipedians.
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my belief is that one way of getting things done is by using peer pressure or by incorporating a competitive element. so, in order to get the things done that you keep putting off for absolutely no good reason we make a kind of pact - we vow that we'll play by the rules of the game i'm about to outline and by doing so, your incentive will be to do well in the game, which is as a direct result of your non procrastinating efforts.
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and -- when the thing is done -- the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
In 2004, we had over 42,000 participants. Nearly 6000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.
So, to recap:
What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.
Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from your novel at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.
When: Sign-ups begin October 1, 2005. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.