Open Source .NET Projects Getting Cold Shoulder? -- Visual Studio Magazine

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Open Source .NET Projects Getting Cold Shoulder?

Back in June of last year, we featured Jeff Atwood in the pages of Redmond Developer News, profiling him and his popular Coding Horror developer blog in the Cool Developer Tricks section of RDN.

At the time, Jeff had expressed a concern that some of the big-name dev bloggers he looked up to were busy running their own software companies and had a lot more going on than he did. Now it seems that Jeff is onto a few small things of his own. Since our interview, Jeff has moved on from his position as a senior technical evangelist at Vertigo Software to devote more of his time to blogging and pursuing an open source project of his own, called Stackoverflow.com.

And, as he recounts in an April 10 Coding Horror blog entry, Jeff has recently awarded a $5,000 grant to Dario Solera of the ScrewTurn Wiki project, which is developing an ASP.NET-based Wiki engine. The award is part of an announced program to recognize outstanding and important efforts in the field of .NET open source development.

Here's where it gets interesting. Jeff contends that "open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem." He says Microsoft is not only wrong to withhold support from open source projects that contribute to the .NET universe; he believes Microsoft's fate as a dev tools provider hinges on the company changing its approach.

It's a point worth discussion. Dev shops worldwide rely on diverse open source tools like DotNetNuke, MbUnit, NAnt, NHibernate and ZedGraph, just to name a few. And yet, for all of Microsoft's efforts to embrace, welcome and work with the open source community (CodePlex, the IronPython and IronRuby projects, Mono development, etc.), it's clear that the .NET-aligned, open source developer community isn't feeling the love from Redmond.

Are you using or considering the use of open source tooling in your development projects? Tell us how you are using these .NET-savvy tools either alongside or in place of Microsoft's own products. Let me know at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.

Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/15/2008 at 6:53 PM

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Reader Comments:

Wed, Feb 11, 2009 Anonymous Anonymous

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Tue, Sep 2, 2008 Anonymous Anonymous

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Thanks, webmaster.

Mon, Aug 25, 2008 Anonymous Anonymous

Nice bog you have here. I pretty much lurk the internet when I'm bored and read all I can about the organic lifestyle, but I really liked you view on things. I'll bookmark the site and subscribe to the feed!

Fri, May 23, 2008 Stormy

Im in the process of building my own ASP.NET API, out of disappointment with DotNetNuke, Rainbow, and many others. I think as .NET developers, or any developer, for that matter, we have to all continually press forward with new innovations and better ways of doing things if we are to continue to build market share for not only our codebases, but Microsoft's .NET framework (and the servers and tools that surround it). This just benefits Microsoft, so its puzzling why they do not embrace more open source .NET systems. To think that they hold the key to innovations surround ASP.NET products, especially, is a bit naive, I think, as there are allot of talented people using the framework and which continue to innovate great products. Its also one reason too why Microsoft continue to chase the dragon's tale (ie Google) in Web systems as a whole. They just are not embracing innovation in ASP.NET like they should and encouraging it. Their sales staff may lose a sale, but they may gain sales of ten servers by an ISP because another company elected to build a business around an innovative ASP.NET platform.

If we do not see more support, then I fear more and more web devs like me may just make the leap to PHP and Ruby. Trust me, most of us dont want to go there.

Wed, Apr 30, 2008 Thomas Hansen Anonymous

@Anonymous
I'm working for an Open Source company (Gaiaware at ajaxwidgets.com) and we're 8 employees. We were 2 one year ago...
We're based on a dual licensed Ajax library which is an alternative for ASP.NET Ajax and to call Open Source "hobbyist doing stupid stuff for hobbyists" is either incredible stupid or incredible arrogant. Are Google a "hobbyist" company? Are Sun a "hobbyist" company? Are Trolltech a "hobbyist" company? What about Adobe, are they a "hobby company"? The economy of Open Source SW is increasing at 4 times the speed of the economy of "closed source" SW...

Wed, Apr 16, 2008 Bill Walker Anonymous

The author is correct - an ever-increasing number of dev shops are indeed relying on open source tools such as DotNetNuke in their project work. An area where Microsoft could perhaps help, from my own perspective, is to shine the light on some of this work being done. Case studies could be sponsored, articles could included in MS magazines, etc. We have people - like "Anonymous" poster here - who still believe DotNetNuke and other .NET open source software is for the hobbyist set only, yet a closer look reveals governmental sites such as California's Department of Child Support Services at www.childsup.ca.gov using DotNetNuke (one example of many); a myriad of NASDAQ listed companies (visit sites for symbols HLCS, CMPP, FRDM, IHCO, NRCI, TMNG, etc.); excellent insitutions such as the St. Louis Children's Hospital (stlouischildrens.org); and mega-sites such as the official National Rugby League in Australia (nrl.com). With the reach of an organization such as Microsoft, we could hope to educate more of those people who confuse .NET open source with hobbyism, our contributors as "losers," and the end recipients of these development projects as anything less than economically-wise business owners.

Wed, Apr 16, 2008 Anonymous Anonymous

Open source is built by losers for losers, all of whom ought to drop their riduculous detachment from reality and get a life. Yeah, I've have more than my share of encounters with open source pariahs such as NHibernate and DotNetNuke and was none the better for it. They're absolutely awful.

There's no escaping the economic reality that you get that for which you pay. Software built by comittees of hobbyists is fine for the consumption of other hobbyists, but their efforts have no place in building the sound infrastructure upon which an increasingly technological society relies. None.

Want to build and play with toys? Fine, just shut up about how its something more valuable than history will prove it to be and get on with life...

Tue, Apr 15, 2008 Anand Iyer SF

Hi Michael,

> And yet, for all of Microsoft's efforts to embrace,
> welcome and work with the open source
> community it's clear that the .NET-aligned, open
> source developer community isn't feeling the
> love from Redmond.

Aside from quoting Jeff Atwood, can you please clarify how you reached this conclusion?

There is no doubt that there is more we can do to better work with the open source community. Some of the points Aaron had made are totally valid and we're doing the best we can to cater to the community's needs.

Thanks,

ai
(MS Evangelist)

Tue, Apr 15, 2008 Ken Weinert Westminster, CO

I'm definitely using .NET as my cross-OS-platform coding platform. For the projects I work on I don't want to lose the folks that run Windows, but I don't concentrate on them either. All my development is done in Mono on my Linux boxes and then compiled over on Windows.

Tue, Apr 15, 2008 Aaron Fulkerson Anonymous

Michael,

I think there is a change underway with respect to Microsoft's perception of open source and open source .NET projects. In fact, they've been very helpful to MindTouch, www.MindTouch.com, which is developed on .NET and deployed on Linux (Mono). As evidence of Microsoft's growing enthusiasm for open source I will direct you to www.microsoft.com slash OpenSource (slash isn't working in comments here), the open source lab, and Port25.

It's an absolute certainty that if Microsoft does not embrace open source they run the risk of becoming irrelevant because it is on open source that innovative development is taking place. Clearly this is due to the prevalence of open source in University CS depts. We come up through the University building on open source technology; of course, we're going to continue using these tools and platforms into our professional career. Microsoft has already made itself largely irrelevant in the Web 2.0 space. After all, who uses .NET in this space?

I will agree that Microsoft still has a long way to go to improve their involvement and support of open source developers on .NET, but it's clear there are senior people who are aware of the importance of open source. Also, it's clear that building open source on .NET can be disadvantageous due to a stigma in some segments and a limited set of projects, libraries, and components to incorporate. However, I expect to see a growing affinity to open source from Microsoft and, unlike others with tin foil hats, I do not believe this is caused by nefarious machinations.

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