A rant on UltraVNC

For a business I run on the side, I need to implement a remote support application. I’ll post more about that later, but first I need to get something off my chest.

UltraVNC is quite possibly the worst-run “open source” project I’ve ever encountered.

• The website looks like a commercial program’s site, and is broken. Lots of links don’t work, and it’s not clear where to go to get what you want. The hundreds of questions on the forums about what should be simple questions is a testament to this.
• The documentation is horrible. It’s not just that there’s little documentation there, it’s that it’s all old (like, from 2005) and there are multiple copies that contradict each other.
• There’s no clear project leader. No one is shepherding it along, gathering consensus, declaring direction. The community is fragmented in dozens of different directions, each going a different way.
• (This one urks me the most.) Despite claiming to be open source (the code is GPL), there’s no central place to get the source. Oh, there’s a subversion repository, but it’s hopelessly out of date, and the released packages don’t come from that source. To get source for some of the central packages you have to (get this) PM someone on the forums, and he usually sends you a link to the source *after several weeks*. Wait until RMS gets a hold of them. Because of this, when people want to make modifications, they end up posting a new package with their changes (patches? what are those?!?) in the forums. For one package I looked at, there were literally 6 different copies of the same package, each based off of a different version, and most incompatible with each other. It boggles the mind.

The project feels like the worst example of IT implementation: done just well enough to work most of the time, but with little thought to security. There’s also a slight conflict of interest, since apparently some of the original developers took the source code, closed it up, made some usability improvements, and released it as a new, incompatible product.

To be fair, UltraVNC isn’t the only one with issues here; the remote support category is filled with one-off, limited (closed-source) projects. In fact, of the projects that I found, UltraVNC actually looks the most promising. The user community is very strong; I really think that if the project were simply run better, it could be a fantastic solution.