Why Alternate Tools and Frameworks Die?
published on 7/23/2008 2:48:19 PM

I love alternate tools and frameworks! The best part of these tools is that everyone wins.  The user wins because he can use the tool to create better applications and the publisher wins since he can scale the application to include paid services and features and make some profit. The publisher also gets exposed to the world through his tool/framework. Source open tools also provide an opportunity to the developers to learn from them.

I have used several tools/frameworks which include:

NHibernate
Castle Project
Rhino Mocks
MbUnit
NUnit
SandCastle
NDoc (RIP)
AJAX PRO Library

NDoc was a great documentation framework which enabled the developers to create MSDN style documentation in few easy steps. Unfortunately, this project is not supported anymore.

AJAX PRO Library was the first AJAX framework that I used. It was developed by Michael Schwar z. The website is still up but the last release was in July 2007 which means it has been 1 year and no new patch or updates has been made.

So, the question is why source open software dies?

In my opinion the biggest culprit is the primary developer’s interest in the software. Creating software is easy but maintaining it is very hard. Maintenance requires that the developer should spend some time on the software at regular basis and pushes patches and new features. Also, sometimes the underlying framework changes making the surface framework/tool malfunction. The bottom line from the developer's side is two works "NO TIME".

This was the developer side of the story. There is also a user side of the story. Users typically wander away from a tool or a framework if they cannot get the initial setup. I use the “Hello World in 10 Minutes Rule” which means if I cannot get the tool/framework working in less than 10 minutes then it is not worth trying. Another reason for users to discard a tool is the support. If they are not able to find their problem in few hours then they are likely to abandon the tool/framework unless they are doing brown field development.

Currently, I am using Castle Active Record framework in one of my projects. I came across a weird problem and immediately posted a detailed message on the Active Record Forms with the hope of getting the answer. It has been 2 days and still no answer.

This makes me think that will I ever get an answer to my question or should I move toward a tool by a different vender, Microsoft.

How can we save the alternate tools and frameworks?