End of the road

[Colby Dillion]

As you may have noticed, updates and bug fixes have become less and less frequent. When I started working on the Fellow Oak DICOM for .NET library, it was not out of the desire to create something that worked for everyone, or that was bug free, or well documented. I had no intention of making a "project" or "product" out of the library. It was simply code that I needed to do my job at the time and I chose to do it in an open manner the same way that anyone else might express themselves on a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. I have definitely not stopped working on the library, it has simply become much more difficult to maintain separate open source and work versions.

I hold myself to a higher standard than to have an unmaintained and undocumented code base with known bugs that people are using. Because of this and due to other work and family obligations, I have chosen to remove my code from GitHub.

As of right now there are 89 forks of the code on GitHub alone, and in the spirit of open source, I encourage you to take the code from those forks and make something of it. (And please, please think of a name better than Fellow Oak DICOM for .NET!) I will no longer be participating, but it would be great to one day see an open source library out there that is better than the proprietary alternatives and have no choice but to come back.

Thank you for all of your contributions, encouragement, and support over the past few years. I hope you will all connect with me on my LinkedIn and other social media profiles. I will also be at a few trade shows next year and would love to meet up.

Colby Dillion

[Anders Gustafsson Cureos AB]

Colby,

your contributions to the medical open source community, first mdcm and later fo-dicom, have been invaluable! I am deeply grateful for all the work and effort you have put into these projects. For me, working on DICOM for the "modern" Windows (tablets and desktops) and Windows Phone, it has made a major difference to have all image coding/decoding and TCP/IP working practically out-of-the-box. I will do my best to maintain your spirit in my fo-dicom fork.

I wish you all the best in the future, and, of course, a BIG BIG THANK YOU for all your fantastic contributions!

Best regards,

Anders @ Cureos

[Chris Horn]

Colby,

Thank you you publishing Fo-dicom and Mdcm before that, both of there libs have given me a deeper understanding of Dicom and in my opinion work better than the commercial that I use daily.
Thanks you for sharing some knowledge with us

I also wish you well.

[Manabu Tokunaga]

Dear Colby,

I have been using it since the time of mdcm. fo-dicom has a lot going. I need it and I use it everyday, and so I will definitely be interested in continuing to work on it, especially now that we have also started Open Health Imaging Foundation, and perhaps under its name, the board may be able to assume a home for it.

It happened at the time when Microsoft is going to open source C#, so I think we have a great momentum going. 

As for myself, I have recently decided to switch gears and put more work on mobile & wearable platforms, fo-dicom can be supportable on Xamarine and stuff like that.

Wishing you and your family the best of luck. Rest assured what you started will carry on to the next level.

[Ian Yates]

I'm quite new to the DICOM world but I think you're selling yourself short.  fo-DICOM, from what I've experienced so far, is a great library / toolkit.  I probably haven't run into many of the rough edges yet (and I'm finally getting around to some tricky bits in the next week - fingers crossed!) but I'm very appreciative of the community here and the great effort and thought invested into the design and functionality of the library.  Best of luck for your future endeavours :)

As Manabu said, the .NET / C# world may well have changed for the better this week.  It'd be great to see this library continue onwards and upwards.  As I get more hands on with DICOM over the coming months I'd be very happy to contribute more to discussions here and kick in some code if the need arises.

[Noster Gerald]

Dear Colby,

not happy to hear that, but I understand your decision. I really appreciate your very good work. I improved my experience in DICOM while working with mDCM and fo-dicom. I wish you all the best in the future.

Thank you

Gerald

[Jussi Mattila]

Dear Colby,

Thanks for all the effort on your Dicom libraries, the work is truly appreciated! Made my life a lot easier during the last two years. :-)

   - Jussi

[Matias]

Colbi, I can't be more grateful and thankful for all the work you have done. I'm using your library and others to build up a system for guided surgery and Fo-Dicom is the main component of my application, I would say it's one of the best out there, thank you so much and whish you the best

[Mahesh Dubey]

Dear Colby;

            Thank you very much for your effort, I am a great fan of yours. Both the mDCM and fo-dicom are very great libraries.Your contribution to open source dicom were simply great,outstanding and unforgettable.

I had worked with lots of other commercial and non commercial dicom libraries but I found all are insignificance when compare to mDCM and fo-Dicom, both the libraries you had wrote were very powerful, The quality of the code in these library are really superb and self explanatory such type of code doesn't require the document for explanation.   

Thanks again for your effort and All the best in the future

Hope to see you again.

[Ravindran Padmanabhan]

Hi Colby, 

We thank you for your effort and the contribution you have made to .net developers.  Appreciate your components and the way it was written have thought us to write or use DICOM libraries in .net platform especially the Jpeg 2000 compression in DICOM. Hope you have a great and solid future and one day you might come back and start contributing to help many like us. 

with regards

Rady

[Hesham Desouky]

Hello Colby

I am talking to you regarding fo-dicom. Me and the team started discussion about the future of fo-dicom library.

One of faced obstacles is to update fo-dicom nuget package. Since we can't do so without being an owner of the package, could you please add my email as Nuget package owner.

Looking forward for your reply.

Best Regards,

[Jaime Olivares]

>> As of right now there are 89 forks of the code on GitHub alone

This is extremely concerning.  I always stuck to the original branch and now we have to pick "some" of the forks.

Any suggestion about the the right fork to follow? This is, some of them which a certain future, good maintenance, wider scope, nugget support, etc?

Anyway, thanks for the good times!

- Jaime

[Anders Gustafsson Cureos AB]

Jaime,

we are trying to bring new life into fo-dicom right now, please see this post.

I totally agree that it is unclear from the fork tree which fork to pick. We are trying to make our fork the base fork, but right now it is not immediately obvious how to do this. We'll keep you posted how things work out.

- Anders Gustafsson

[Anders Gustafsson Cureos AB]

UPDATE!

Great news! Github has kindly switched the base fork to our fo-dicom organization fork, so from now on https://github.com/fo-dicom/fo-dicom is the new base fork.

With the help of this great fo-dicom community we can make an already excellent DICOM toolkit even better! 

Pull requests, wiki documentation updates and issue reports to the fo-dicom/fo-dicom repo are all most welcome. 

And you are also welcome to participate in the discussion on the Gitter chat forum.

Happy continued fo-dicom:ing, everyone!

[Jaime Olivares]

These are absolutely great news!