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The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

aaronstannard.com

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Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#91

Post by edwinnathaniel »

tpetricek wrote: post #59

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 lead…

Probably it's heading toward where niche ecosystem/platform is today: Haskell, Erlang. But with less uptake because the similar audiences/users of those platforms are less likely to touch Microsoft... (even if they're reaching cross-platforms)

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#92

Post by jasode »

jameshart wrote: post #89
jasode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether/when Sun released the source code isn't as relevant as the fact that JDK and JRE 1.0 in 1995 were free . Microsoft .NET 1.0 development in 2002 required paid tools and a free version (Visual Studio Express) didn't happen until 2005. VS Express was also crippled in comparison to the paid product (VS Professional). We can't just look at the technical features and syntax of C# and compare to Java. (E.g. they bot…

In general, you're correct about the difference being social, nt one of licencing. You're wrong on one thing: Microsoft's .NET 1.0 CLR and compilers were also free from day one. You never HAD to use VS to develop with .NET, any more than you HAD to use NetBeans or Eclipse to develop with Java.

Yes, the .NET SDK had a command line compiler so theoretically, it could compile .cs files for free. However, nobody used it for serious Windows Forms GUI type of work. Realistically, corporations and hobbyists had to buy VS Studio to write non-trivial apps. On the other hand, people were writing Java GUI apps with free tools. Eclipse was free back in 2001 before .NET 1.0 was released.

The only common use case I remember for the free C# command line compiler was to type in exercises from C# tutorials.

Also, even if compiling C# source code was free, the execution stack for the NET runtime was not free. MS Windows operating system licenses and MS SQL Server cost money. In comparison, Linux and MySQL were free. The different costs for deployment affected social dynamics as well.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#93

Post by jameshart »

bunderbunder wrote: post #90
jameshart wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, you're correct about the difference being social, nt one of licencing. You're wrong on one thing: Microsoft's .NET 1.0 CLR and compilers were also free from day one. You never HAD to use VS to develop with .NET, any more than you HAD to use NetBeans or Eclipse to develop with Java.

True, but I shudder at the thought of having to manage msbuild files by hand without the help of Visual Studio.

For .NET 1.0, there was no msbuild - csproj files were not build files, and they weren't part of .NET, but part of VS. And until James Duncan Davidson got fed up with maintaining batch files and threw together Ant to manage his Tomcat build process, there was no build solution for Java, either.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#94

Post by axus »

macintux wrote: post #27

I asked on Twitter long ago for any prominent examples of open source software that originated on Windows and transitioned to other platforms. I think after some discussion we may have come up with an example. Maybe. I certainly can't recall what it was.

PuTTY! For some reason, it was the only software that would reliably communicate on the serial port of one particular Linux system I was using.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#95

Post by baghira »

jameshart wrote: post #60
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 l…

The OOXML "standardization" is more recent. So is Silverlight.

In the end I'm always puzzled when people talk about Microsoft or Apple as if it was one dude who ran over your cat in the early 2000s. It's a vast corporation, whose attitude towards opensource has improved, at least in the cloud and .NET environment (though I've read people comparing Microsoft to Red Hat and Joyent, which is clearly way off). For instance, the issue I find most egregious is selling Windows phones with a restricted bootloader, just like Apple does.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#96

Post by dang »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #77

To the author: Way to contribute to .NET's image problem with your negative title. If your point is to get more people using .NET then you should have gone with something positive that reflected the last section of your article. To the mods here: Didn't think to change this one, did you?

> To the mods here: Didn't think to change this one, did you?

We took "profound" out (we often remove superlatives and the like), but I don't see anything else that needs changing here. It isn't gratuitously negative to claim or discuss weakness.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#97

Post by shoover »

brightball wrote: post #68
daxfohl wrote: post #22

A good chunk of that is the "invented here syndrome". With EF, WPF, ASP MVC, MEF, etc, plus annual MSBuild conferences, .Net has far more internally-developed ecosystem than Java. Which tends to promote the idea that the MS way is the right way, and if I need something else I must be doing something wrong (or I need to wait till next year). Perhaps MS should just kill off all these frameworks and force the community…

That's one of my favorite things about Microsoft. Whenever they release a framework or a product, there's a tendency to just call it whatever the name of the technology is as if they invented the whole thing. SQL Server - When .NET developers say SQL they mean SQL Server 90% of the time it seems. MVC - MVC4 is a .NET Rails clone. Named MVC as if Microsoft originated the design pattern that was used to clone another f…

Apple does the same thing. i?Obvious.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#98

Post by digler999 »

vdnkh wrote: post #17

Yes, the author is correct. There is a distinct lack of OSS in .NET. I've been trying to find a project to contribute to among the graveyard on Github. However, I think the author falls flat explaining the why. I have a few thory on this. For so long C# has been a walled garden of closed source software. This closed source software, for the most part, works damn well. Why reinvent a square wheel when there is a shop…

> the author falls flat explaining the why.

Probably because the proprietary ecosystems are built from the ground up to support the profiteering enterprise that is/was microsoft. They don't make money by embracing open standards. They make money (or at least historically) by creating technical monopolies with short shelf-lives that naturally support vendor lock-in. They make money by creating the problem (obsolesence ) and selling you the solution (*Yipee! version (N+1) Super Enterprise is officially released. Time to upgrade, everybody !).

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#99

Post by fla »

fla wrote: post #75
vdnkh wrote: post #17

Yes, the author is correct. There is a distinct lack of OSS in .NET. I've been trying to find a project to contribute to among the graveyard on Github. However, I think the author falls flat explaining the why. I have a few thory on this. For so long C# has been a walled garden of closed source software. This closed source software, for the most part, works damn well. Why reinvent a square wheel when there is a shop…

I think it's important to note that Microsoft wasn't the platform of choice to act as a server - for most of the projects at least. Also, big corps who developed server-side OSS kept it for themselves.

s/server-side OSS/server-side software

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#100

Post by meragrin »

starik36 wrote: post #88
brightball wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of my favorite things about Microsoft. Whenever they release a framework or a product, there's a tendency to just call it whatever the name of the technology is as if they invented the whole thing. SQL Server - When .NET developers say SQL they mean SQL Server 90% of the time it seems. MVC - MVC4 is a .NET Rails clone. Named MVC as if Microsoft originated the design pattern that was used to clone another f…

Actually, MVC is called ASP.NET MVC. And at this point, it is very far from a Rails clone.

The use of 'MVC - MVC4' seems to me to be an acknowledgement that it is no longer a Rails clone.
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