It's with mixed emotions that I announce I'm ceasing development of my very first project: ASP Stats Generator.
This was a very hard decision but in the last month I realized I probably took this decision years ago without making an official announcement. The ASP Stats Generator project was born more than 7 years ago and many things changed in this timeframe.
There are many reasons behind this choice. I'm going to explain some in no particular order.
First, I'm no longer a Windows user and I haven't been writing a single line of ASP code in the last 4 years. I happily switched to Mac OS X 3 years ago and it's hard to code in ASP when you don't have the native environment. I could have used a virtual machine but, hey, this is ASP… Microsoft killed ASP almost 5 years ago, why should I continue to work on it?
I started working on ASP in 2002. Since then I learned many other programming languages including Java, PHP and Ruby and I met the wonderful world of Object-Oriented Programming and, dude, nothing and nobody can convince me that ASP is still worth a single minute of my time.
Talking about time, I'm currently involved in many other open source and private projects. I'm going to launch RoboDomain by the end of the year and I have some exciting ideas I'd like to work on. Also, I have a full-time job and there aren't any additional free slots for ASP Stats Generator right now.
Despite all my love for ASP Stats Generator, I recognize that there are many other excellent alternatives out there. I started ASP Stats Generator because I really needed it so I was its first user. IMHO, this is one of the most important keys for a successful project: use the products that you make. We (programmers) always refer to this as dogfooding.
I'm no longer eating my own dog food since I moved all my projects to Ruby on Rails, including ASP Stats Generator website. Nowadays there are many other free alternatives such as Google Analytics and I encourage you to consider switching to a more powerful and flexible solution.
You can tell me "hey, but I can't manage my data because they are hosted elsewhere". You are right, but you can still programmatically access them through their API so, once again, consider switching to a more powerful and flexible solution.
Let me spend a couple of lines talking about users. ASP Stats Generator is a really successful project. I still can't believe that it has been downloaded and installed hundreds of thousands of times. I'm really thankful to all the users and I can't say how much I appreciate the donations I received in these 7 years. They didn't help me too much with the development, but I was really happy to know someone else was so thankful to buy me a beer.
On the other hand, ASP Stats Generator reminded me that the world is still full of nasty people. In 7 years I found at least 50 people who stole my free project, removed all credits and sold it to their clients. They were mostly small and medium web agencies run by people stupid enough to not understand that someone else was spending his own time to develop a free application. Yes, ASP Stats Generator is a free application and you don't have to pay a single buck to download or install it. You can also offer it to your client but, of course, you can't sell it just because… it's free and should be free for everyone.
Unfortunately, the Italian justice is not ready for the internet yet. I had a hard time trying to manage the most significant copyright infringements and I just don't have time for that. This is sad and somewhat unbelievable: I have to pay to make sure a free project remains free…
So where does this project go from here? I don't have any special plan for ASP Stats Generator. I didn't sell it when I've been asked, thus it will probably continue to exist as long as it doesn't take too much effort to keep the site, the forum and all the stuff online.
However, please know I won't follow the development or the support forum any further. Also, any email asking about the code or the installation will likely be ignored. I'm not trying to be rude, but I'd like to cut as much as I can.
So, thank you to all of you and goodbye ASP Stats Generator.