Something to keep in mind is while it’s the same developer, the ownership history of NNW had a few rocky years.

At some point Brent Simmons started work on an entirely new RSS reader he was at the time calling Evergreen, intended only for the Mac at that point, and eventually he got the rights to NetNewsWire back. So there’s a break point between NetNewsWire the commercial software and NetNewsWire the open source project.

In many ways, the new NetNewsWire is a solid improvement, but it’s also missing a lot of features that the old NetNewsWire had since it was no longer his day job and he rethought a lot things. I don’t share the parent’s feelings but I can get why some people would still be a tinge salty about it, cuz for a period of time there NetNewsWire was pretty much in limbo, Brent was the developer but for most of its commercial life it was under the auspices of NewsGator and one of the companies that was supposed to keep it going (Black Pixel I think? It’s been a while and I’m going mostly off the dime here) basically didn’t do shit with it.

This was around the time of the run up to NetNewsWire 4.0. I think only NNW 4.0 Lite ended up shipping, and that was around the time the parent was paying $10.00 to run a version on his iPad for software that was from a reasonable customer’s perspective, entering its life support era. And then of course Google Reader was killed in the night a couple of years later, a sacrifice for Google+, and anybody still running NetNewsWire no longer had any good syncing options. That NetNewsWire was abandoned, and is still dead, but yes, the new one is pretty great.

So your positive spin doesn’t really land here. Not for anybody that was around at the time.