I was on vacation when this happened, but NCover has become a product you pay for. The rationale for the change is a fair one, and I’m impressed by how Gnoso (the vendor of NCover) is looking out for people who donated to the project when it was free. NCover 1.58 remains free, but doesn’t have the same level of features as NCover 2.0 (or 2.0 Enterprise).
Gnoso has that product niche basically themselves since Cenqua, the vendor of Clover.NET, got bought by Atlassian in August. Since Atlassian is end-of-lifing Clover.NET, the coverage tool bundled with Team Foundation Server is the only option for .NET code coverage functionality.
Given the choice between paying for functionality that used to be free and losing it altogether (as happened with NDoc), I’d fork over the dough in at least some cases. Whatever they intend to charge, odds are they won’t be Microsoft prices.
It will be interesting to see how many other tools that are currently free make a similar transition.