Please clarify the license

[Const-me]

Hi. You’re saying it’s MIT, yet you’re using a third-party DLL itextsharp.dll 5.5.13.1 which is covered by AGPL.

AGPL license is highly contagious, may even contaminate the content produced by the library.

Could you please fix somehow? For instance, by downgrading to this version: https://www.nuget.org/packages/iTextSharp-LGPL/

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

Previously discussed in https://github.com/dotnet/docfx/issues/4250.

However, it seems DocFX v3 is nearing release (there is 3.0.0-beta1.1026+6bdacad7f0 now) and AFAIK does not have any GNU AGPL dependency.

[bitbonk]

However, it seems DocFX v3 is nearing release

I highly doubt that there is still a plan to release v3 at all. v3 is solely used for docs.microsoft.com and there hasn't been any sign that they are going to invest in making a community version of it.

[glopesdev]

I highly doubt that there is still a plan to release v3 at all. v3 is solely used for docs.microsoft.com and there hasn't been any sign that they are going to invest in making a community version of it.

Is this true? Would like to hear from the maintainers about what the official stance is regarding the future of DocFX as we are currently considering adopting it for documentation across a large community project.

[bitbonk]

I am not a maintainer of DocFX so I can't speak for them but I am an avid user and contributor of DocFX since 2017 and can speak about what I have observed.

Version 3 of DocFX has been in development at least since 2018 and is used on docs.microsoft.com since 2019.

In the early years, the DocFX team was well involved with the community and very helpful and responsive in the GitHub issues and the gitter chat and even implemented feature requests made by the community. Especially @vicancy and @superyyrrzz did an awesome job here!

But at some point (probably somewhere around early 2020) the DocFX team has completely and totally stopped all communication with the community seemingly focusing purely on the need of docs.microsoft.com and the internal development of version 3. The many unanswered issues (not just open issues, but issues with no response at all) here on GitHub speak for themselves, the gitter chat and the @docfxproject twitter has been completely abandoned by the team and stackoverflow looks equally sad.

That's also when version 2 switched into pure maintenance mode containing only bugfixes and no more new features. As a result version 2 has fallen far behind, still relying on Visual Studio being installed and not supporting newer .NET features such as C# 9, 10, global tools etc.

There have been many attempts to get an answer about the future of DocFX (e.g. Twitter, GitHub). The answer was always some "other priorities" bla bla.

So altogether I don't have high hopes for the future of DocFX. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Unfortunately there are not many alternatives for documentation that integrate well with .NET (Statiq by @daveaglick being the only one I know of) so we are basically stuck with DocFX in its current unsatisfactory condition.

[lextm]

@bitbonk Sandcastle is another feasible option. It has been upgraded to support new .NET bits, so I already switched back to that for months.

[bitbonk]

We migrated from Sandcastle to DocFX many years ago and were glad to leave it behind because it was a big PITA.

[markjulmar]

Thanks for highlighting this issue - we need to unify the licensing and make sure we aren't pulling in dependencies which don't align to the open-source licensing we are published under. I've assigned this to me to investigate, but if there are other spots you are aware of, please let me know.