Open source projects have been the talk of the tech blogs recently with the announcement that NDoc 2 is Offcially Dead, along with the mention that the project's sole develop was a victim of an automated mail-bomb attack because the project wasn't getting a .Net 2.0 version out fast enough for their liking. Kevin has decided to withdraw from the community, and fears for himself and his family. The .Net blogging community has had a wide range of reactions:
- Phil Haack talks about his ideas behind helping/saving the open source community and laid down a challenge.
- Eric Wise mentions that he will not work on another FOSS project.
- Scott Hanselman laments that Microsoft hasn't put together an Ineta like organization to handle giving grants to open source projects, and also shows how easy it is to submit a patch/fix to a project.
- Peter Provost worries that bringing money into the equation may spoil the cool part of community developed software, and that leadership is the key to good open source projects.
- Derek Denny-Brown says that "Microsoft needs to understand that Community is more than just lots of vendors creating commercial components, or MVPs answering questions on newsgroups".
Now, I contribute to a bunch of different open source projects, some just recently released (XPathmania), some alive but not currently active (Mvp.Xml project) and some dead but still available (SharpVectors), so I can sort of understand how Kevin feels. But what everyone seems to have missed is that working on an open source project is really no different then any other form of community service. Sometimes we get a little full of ourselves, and think that we are doing something a little more, umm, meaningful, but that really isn't the case. We are really just doing what we love, and giving back to our "community". Yes our community is more virtual then real, but it still is a community. I've often explained to my family that when I work on an open source project, or do a talk at some local user group, it is the same as the guy that donates his time to coach a local Little League or soccer team, or just like when a mom volunteers to help with a school booster group (or the PTA). If you have ever done any of that type of volunteer work, odds are you have run into the same sort entitlement culture that Kevin had to deal with. The difference is that my community is a little harder to define (and the entitlement antagonists can seem a little more scary since they don't live in your community). I like Scott Hanselman's suggestion of an Open Source Grant organization, I'd just rather see the money come from the Gates Foundation, rather then from Microsoft, and maybe that would help develop a better sense of community.