Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

aaronstannard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 215 posts

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#51

Post by sudioStudio64 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #33

Edit: Perhaps this comment is gratuitously negative. Nonetheless I'm not going to delete it because all these things contribute to why people have avoided MS/Windows and hence .NET. (Mono's great and has worked well for me in some scenarios, but, say, with ASP.NET/EF it hasn't been totally stable like the CLR.) I've also invested a ton of time into using MS and promoting them (MVP at one point), so I think I'm rather…

You make it sound like the ops for AD and Exchange type businesses is some bad thing. It's a huge installed base. It's massive. they provide revenue. Open source dev stacks build mindshare not direct revenue.

Yes, they were slow to adapt to the changes that happened in the last decade. They seem to be turning it around. Why the emotions?

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#52

Post by reustle »

bigdubs wrote: post #6

The OSS "weaknesses" of .net are a chicken and an egg problem; the more people who come from a community software background that use a framework, the more community software there will be for that framework. Having what reads as a very angry and negative blogpost about the state of .net oss isn't really helping. Contributing software is though, and that really should have been the focus of the post, not how weak and…

Did you read the article? It was almost entirely about how much he has contributed to the community.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#53

Post by lectrick »

jameshart wrote: post #43
lectrick wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked this analogy. Why is it getting downvoted? It's totally true. Too much cognitive dissonance between open-source on a for-profit foundation.

Doesn't explain why Java developed a robust OSS ecosystem long before it went open source. Java did benefit from the model Sun set up on J2EE of setting out JSR 'specifications' and only providing limited capability reference implementations, which made it possible for the Apache Java ecosystem to spring up, initially around the Xerces and Xalan XML libraries. Maybe - maybe - Microsoft is starting to get on board wit…

That's... a good counterargument.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#54

Post by buckbova »

lectrick wrote: post #18

I'm glad that Microsoft is absorbing enough young guys who went through college realizing open-source is cool to actually influence their future direction, but based on the entire self-interested history of Microsoft ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish or http://www.pcworld.com/article/2901262/microsoft-tightens-wi... or http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/microsoft-management-mocks-... ) and…

Just so you know, when I went through college 15 years ago or so and we used open source technologies too. Nobody I went to school with was dying to use whatever vb/asp/iis or jboss server was out there or use windows anything at all.

But, if you get hired at MS and they want you to work on the mssql team, you're not going to recommend they scrap it for mysql.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#55

Post by MichaelGG »

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #51
MichaelGG wrote: post #33

Edit: Perhaps this comment is gratuitously negative. Nonetheless I'm not going to delete it because all these things contribute to why people have avoided MS/Windows and hence .NET. (Mono's great and has worked well for me in some scenarios, but, say, with ASP.NET/EF it hasn't been totally stable like the CLR.) I've also invested a ton of time into using MS and promoting them (MVP at one point), so I think I'm rather…

You make it sound like the ops for AD and Exchange type businesses is some bad thing. It's a huge installed base. It's massive. they provide revenue. Open source dev stacks build mindshare not direct revenue. Yes, they were slow to adapt to the changes that happened in the last decade. They seem to be turning it around. Why the emotions?

I didn't mean that to sound bad. Exchange is great! Servicing those customers is smart and fine. But MS focused on them to the point of excluding everyone else, intentionally. (See the SSH announcement, how the tech team tried to do it since v1, but management refused approval.) MS knew they had lock in, went down that path exclusively, and is now trying to catch up because the cool kids left them behind.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#56

Post by lectrick »

j_s wrote: post #36
lectrick wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked this analogy. Why is it getting downvoted? It's totally true. Too much cognitive dissonance between open-source on a for-profit foundation.

I interpreted it more along the lines of the impact of Microsoft's underhanded tactics over the years.

Oh I also saw it that way too. See my other big comment in this thread lol

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#57

Post by lectrick »

UK-AL wrote: post #23
lectrick wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked this analogy. Why is it getting downvoted? It's totally true. Too much cognitive dissonance between open-source on a for-profit foundation.

Tons of open source software is developed by for profit companies???

But were those companies ever openly hostile towards open-source? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish and http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/microsoft-management-mocks-... and many other examples abound.

I mean... It's nice that they're trying to "come clean," now, and all. But it's sort of like a criminal who was never punished now claiming to be legit because he's seen the light... and there's PLENTY of us out there still who still feel wronged by the past.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#58

Post by sudioStudio64 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #55
sudioStudio64 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like the ops for AD and Exchange type businesses is some bad thing. It's a huge installed base. It's massive. they provide revenue. Open source dev stacks build mindshare not direct revenue. Yes, they were slow to adapt to the changes that happened in the last decade. They seem to be turning it around. Why the emotions?

I didn't mean that to sound bad. Exchange is great! Servicing those customers is smart and fine. But MS focused on them to the point of excluding everyone else, intentionally. (See the SSH announcement, how the tech team tried to do it since v1, but management refused approval.) MS knew they had lock in, went down that path exclusively , and is now trying to catch up because the cool kids left them behind.

I'll give you that. Cheers.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#59

Post by tpetricek »

I think it is important to realize that the .NET OSS ecosystem is not something that has been around for a long time. In the F# community, it truly started working as an "OSS ecosystem" only a couple of years ago - and the rest of .NET is following - and I'd say it is only starting to really exist now. Although .NET has been around for ages, people are only learning what OSS means and I think the F# community is leading the way here.

There are definitely interesting hard problems that are being solved in the F# community. For some larger and fully open source projects that exist out there check out:

* http://www.m-brace.net - A fantastic library for doing interactive cloud computation that takes a slightly different approach than Spark (think "cloud monad" :-))

* http://fslab.org - A nicely integrated collection of data science libraries with fantastic data access features and R integration (supported by OSS community and a finance company)

* http://websharper.com - An open source library for doing web programming that has a pretty unique integration of client-side programming (translated to JS) with server-side programming

* Also, I would like to mention FAKE, Paket and ProjectScaffold (http://fsprojects.github.io/ProjectScaffold) which enable the community build OSS libraries with smooth build process and great documentation.

Is it impressive compared with longer and more established OSS communities? Maybe not. But those are all things that happened over the last 2 years. It's enough to make me feel that the F# and .NET ecosystems are heading in a good direction.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#60

Post by jameshart »

JamesBarney wrote: post #39

Here is some blatant speculation about the problem with .NET and OSS. The the larger problem is one of self-selection. C# devs are not alone in not contributing to opens source software. The vast majority of devs don't make meaningful contributions to OSS. It's just the the few people who get really stoked about open source software and love making a positive contribution to world through software have been turned of…

"Microsoft's behavior for the last 10-15 years"

The 'bad stuff' from an OSS point of view is, generally, longer ago than that.

- "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish": 1995 - US vs. Microsoft Corp: 1998 - Halloween Documents: 1998

Scraping under the 15 year bar:

- Microsoft vs Sun settlements: 2001-2002 - Ballmer "Linux is a Cancer": 2001

SCO vs IBM was 2003, so I guess fits into the '10-15' ballpark, but I think "over the last 10-15 years" makes it seem more continuous than the evidence suggests. If you were to describe Microsoft's behavior over the last 10-15 years with respect to open source software, I think a fair assessment would be "improving".

I'm not, honestly, trying to be an apologist for this stuff - it was, clearly, Microsoft policy for a long time to deliberately and pretty unscrupulously undermine Linux and Java and open source adoption. It doesn't appear to be policy to compete unfairly any more, and in some cases MS is producing technologies which support usage of non-MS-originated open and open source technologies. Can we begin to move on a little?

Post reply on HN