I'm going to be changing the ORMapper to open source very soon and I wanted to make sure that everyone that has paid understands.  First, the intent of my subscription was never to have a commercial product that would require updates and support forever.  Many of you may even remember that I started back in 2002 with a simple website that featured page templates and best practices.  In my pursuit of learning and trying things out things I added more features, like multiple forms, localization, master pages, and more.  And then I became interested in O/R Mapping and at the time very few options were available for .NET, but MS was planning ObjectSpaces.  Had something like NHibernate existed at that time then I most likely would never have went down this path, but it simply did not exist yet.  So I made my own simple ORMapper and gradually added more features -- all for my own use initially, hoping to move to ObjectSpaces at a later time.  Well ObjectSpaces was dropped, and enough people loved my ORMapper that it took on a life of its own, even after NHibernate due to the simplicity.  But the cold hard facts are that I have simply been unable to find the time for far too long to continue updating and supporting the ORMapper.  For the most part that hasn't been a huge deal since the ORMapper has been feature rich enough for the vast majority of users for some time now.  Its also been extremely stable for the vast majority of users, although there is a "zombie" issue that a small minority of users have faced.  There is also a user submitted patch for that which I have yet to officially apply since I have never been able to reliably reproduce the issue.  So since users have long contributed back, and have apparently fixed this bug also, it really makes sense to just make this open source given my lack of time.  Its also worth pointing out that Linq to Sql is just around the corner, and while it certainly isn't perfect, it is nonetheless probably good enough for me.  And that means that it will become one of my main priorities when I do find time, already absorbing the little bit I have found, and that's not fair to the ORMapper.  Also, in the spirit of my original intent, I want to use my time to continue learning and trying out new things, and that runs counter to more time on the ORMapper.  So while some of you may feel you've now paid unnecessarily, my hope is that I will be able to do something else cool that you will get access to as subscribers.  Very much like my original subscribers paid for page templates and eventually got a free ORMapper, you will at some point find more things on my site if I move on.  For instance, I'd like to radically revise my portal framework to feature Linq to Sql and more, which will focus on best practices you can use even if you could care less about the portal itself.  Of course that depends on me finding enough time, but I'm more likely to find time to do something totally new since I have to learn and try out these new things anyhow.  So to finish this email before I go on longer, look for an announcement from myself and Brian DeMarzo in the coming days or weeks about the ORMapper being open source.

Thanks, Paul Wilson

The Google Code project has all the source code for the 4.2.2.0 release (or whatever release was pre-Subscriber Release), with some small changes (mostly cosmetic) in the SVN repo. The pre-VS2005 project files aren't there because I don't have VS2003 on my workstation any more.

The project is there and waiting for anyone who wants to contribute to it or submit patches to it. So far, not a single person has done so much as contact me about it. If you want to have direct check-in access to the repo, let me know.