blogs.conchango.com

Marco,

I've known Francois for a number of years because of my interest in the Netron Project - he is an amazing guy - I'm not sure how much you know about him - he has a PhD in theoretical physics and is very much an academic through and through; he’s passionate about sharing the knowledge, hence why he wrote so many samples, tutorials and blog posts about the Netron Project. All for no money at all. For all his 3 years of work and support to the community he only received $189 in donations. That's shameful.

But many people do not understand the amount of dedication, time effort you have to pour into running a successful OS product.

As Francois once wrote to me: “I don’t count the hours of trying to make CVS work, to learn working with Sourceforge’s Linux facilities, the maintenance of the website, testing of PHP code and the MySQL database…so much nobody notice. Although I’m happy to have gained a rather broad knowledge of web-related technologies and software release processes I cannot deny that often it’s a burden to have to put so much energy in stuff only tangent to the actual diagramming library.”

Francois was working from 5am until he went to work every morning and then many hours in the evening, in order to work on the code and support the community. But the support the community demanded prevented him from doing what he enjoys most - academic research; instead of spending time on quantum-gravity issues or doing some amazing R&D work on future versions of the Netron Framework, he felt a sense of responsibility towards the current users and spent most of his time supporting users of Netron V1 and V2 even though he was rapidly losing interest in them as he found better ways of implementing the framework (in .NET 3.0 and WPF for example). Can you really blame him for cutting the lead weights of a legacy project when his academic nature is screaming to do cutting edge research?

Personally I think the community has been damn lucky to have a project of that quality and should stop trying to hold Francois to account for it, but should instead thank him for all the work he poured into it and help and support him to do research into new ventures, which I’m sure will be equally as ground breaking.

On a final note, if Francois had sold the source to Northwoods – why is the source available under the banner of “Netron-Reloaded” and why does Francois publicly support this spin off project? Surely Northwoods would have something to say about “their” source being available to the whole world?

In Francois own words: “Your blog of November 6th states that Netron was purchased by Northwoods. That is not correct. It's just a redirect to the Northwoods site to give developers the only valuable alternative on the .Net market.”