Oh No!! NDoc 2.0 has died due to lack of support (read the post).

And now I feel kinda guilty as well. I used NDoc to generate the reference guide for the AtomsFramework, and for other non-O/S projects as well.

I really feel for Kevin. I know personally how much time I spent getting the AtomsFramework up and running, supporting others who used it, and so forth. Of the almost 13,000+ downloads and with it being used in a number of live projects around the world I recieved a total of 1 donation. That's a pretty poor hit rate.

Yet at the same time I ask myself how many contributions have I made to open source? I can think of none. I know I've paid for shareware, but not for O/S. Why? Probably because it didn't really occur to me at the time. I download something to see if it works. If it doesn't I ingore it, if it does I just use it - forgetting to go back to the creators and give them a tip.

Having said that I guess that I did feel a little let down by the lack of financial thankyou's. And I can empathise with Kevin deeply. NDoc has been downloaded 13,000,000 times. If Kevin recieved 1 donation for every 13,000 downloads (which is my ratio) that would have been 1,000 donations. At an average of say $10 per donation it's still a pretty poor return. $10,000 for something used by well over 1,000,000 developers and extremely well known world wide is laughable.

Imagine if he charged $25 per seat and sold _only_ 130,000 copies (1%). He would have made over $3 million dollars!!

We really do need to support open source financially. I'm using NHibernate now for a project so I guess it's time to pull out the wallet and cough up some cash.