End of free public support

I would like to announce that as of today, April 1^st 2012, support of the AForge.NET project is reduced - no further public support is provided.

Officially the AForge.NET framework project was started a bit more than 5 years ago - the 1.0.0 version was released on December 21^st 2006. However the history of it starts a bit earlier, when a very first image processing code was put on Code Project web site back in March 2005. So now it is about 7 years since the code started to grow and evolve.

Originally everything was started as a hobby project. I was interested in the areas like computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc., so was putting together different code aimed for applications in these areas. And I must admit I am still very interested in those areas. So, as you may ask, what has changed since then? Well, I would say quite a lot - as on the project side, as in the life outside of it.

Speaking about project, I may need to mention that it grew up quite a lot in size, amount of features, documentation, quality, number of samples, support provided to users, etc. And while the project was growing, it was quite easy to notice that amount of time and type of work I do for it have changed over time. If initially it was more of a hobby project when I was doing more of the things interesting to me, then later it became more of support work - provide support to users on the forum, add features users are looking for, provide documentation and samples which would help community to start using the AForge.NET framework, etc, etc. Of course I still have a chance to do things I would like to do, but I found that sometimes I need to spend my own free time doing things which I am not eager to do, but I need to do them to keep the status and quality of the project. So from time to time I was asking myself a very simple question - why should I sacrifice my hobby interests, time spent with family or any other activities?

It seems like some of the AForge.NET framework's users may have a bit of misunderstanding. It seems like some people believe that I am kind of a dedicated framework support developer working for a company (whatever else) which supports the framework. But I am not. I am like everyone else - have a job, family, etc. and all the work on the AForge.NET framework is done solely at my own free time. That is it, nothing more.

When the project started to grow and attract interest from community, I thought that potentially someday it may grow into something more if community would support it. But it did not happen. So the project stays in the same status as it was 5 years ago - hobby project. The only thing which has changed is that now it is less of a hobby, but more of a support activity. However it is time to change things back. If the community can not provide support to the project, then I can not put all my free time on it either.

So, starting from today, April 1^st 2012, I am going to stop public support of the project. The above said means that I will concentrate more on the things which are interesting to me and less on the things which are interesting to the rest. The idea is to turn this back into hobby rather than daily routine support. If there are critical bugs found, then I may try fixing them. But the rest will be done when/if I have interest/requirement for it.

As a consequence to the above, the AForge.NET's discussion boards will be disabled starting from today. They will stay there, but in read only mode, so no more new posts will be possible - only searching will stay. Someone may ask - what is the point of disabling discussion boards? Potentially these boards could stay letting framework users to continue discussions. However, I need to mention that there are not many active users willing to do discussions - at least I can not see them around. Sometimes active users do appear on the forum, but they disappear same way quickly. For the last 3 years spent on the forum, I noticed that majority of discussions are done by me. Which I did as part of the project support. Which I am closing since now. So forum is closed then too.

So, if there are questions about the code, how it works, what and why it does, what are the features, API, etc., etc., you are welcome to use such sources of information as: documentation, sample applications, some published articles or simply read the source code in the end. And don't forget one of the very important things which many of you ignore for some reasons - there is a "Search" button somewhere on the top of this web page.

And finally, thank you all for the time spent here and for the valuable comments/feedback/contribution provided. I learnt a lot from all of you (or may be most ;) ).

Sincerely,
Andrew