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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

#121

Post by WorldWideWayne »

dang wrote: post #96
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.

It was taken out after I said it then.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#122

Post by nl »

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…

Sorry, but that is a nonsense excuse.

The (now abandoned) Spring.NET project[1] was started in 2004, not too long after (Java) Spring started.

It's easy to criticize Java Spring, but it's a good example of a long-lived successful Open Source project. It's also easy to argue that Spring isn't as useful in .NET as in Java.

But I can pull up many, may other examples (the .NET Lucene port etc).

My point is that the .NET OSS ecosystem is NOT a new thing, but it keeps getting killed off. The typical example is that a .NET project starts to solve a problem, gets it 30-40% solved, then Microsoft releases a project that solves a different 30-40% but sucks all the oxygen out of the ecosystem.

[1] http://springframework.net/news.html

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#123

Post by ghuntley »

MichaelGG wrote: post #108
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.

Free on Windows. And only supported on Windows, despite Rotor. That's a fairly non-trivial "hidden" cost.

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr

Windows, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#124

Post by pistle »

achr2 wrote: post #29

This is a real problem. Not one, but two great open source WPF control libraries I contributed to got 'taken over' (bought out I assume) by a major component seller (XCEED). Of course the community contributions disappeared as the company started selling updates as a pro version with their 'premium' features.

Was AvalonDock one?

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#125

Post by throwaway2048 »

baghira wrote: post #95
jameshart wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 instan…

not to mention the plethora of patent lawsuits they launch via shit like intellectual ventures

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#126

Post by dang »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #121
dang wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It was taken out after I said it then.

Oh yes, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. If that's the bit you were objecting to, I apologize for misreading your comment.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#127

Post by Gibbon1 »

deet wrote: post #120
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…

Indeed. And it's very possible that the .NET OSS ecosystem will grow dramatically soon, once its core components, compilers, and build tools finish being open sourced and become stable on non-Windows platforms. The article accused people using .NET of not choosing to work on hard problems. I suspect that's it's the other way around. People working on hard problems have chosen other tools that they felt were more appr…

I've rolled this around a bit and have come down on the side that there are two factors at work.

1. Just plain Microsoft Hate. Couple of times someones asked me about what language to use for some GUI that messes with a database and does some other thing, running on Windows and 'maybe Linux' I tell them that C#/.net was made for that kind of thing. And they recoil in horror as if they just realized that I'm Satan. Then they go off and mess around with QT/C++ for a week before giving up.

2. C# has good inter-op with C/C++ libraries. So if there is an open source widget in C/C++ you need you can usually just build it as a dll with some wrapper magic and reference those in your project.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#128

Post by edgyswingset »

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…

> When .NET developers say SQL they mean SQL Server 90% of the time it seems

I've never experienced someone saying SQL and meaning SQL Server. In fact it's always been about SQL the language, agnostic of the fact that SQL Server has a SQL engine.

Re: The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

#130

Post by edgyswingset »

dozzie wrote: post #84
0xCMP wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always new stuff and C# is going to still be much faster than say a python or ruby so just like go replaces a lot of stuff written in those languages it wouldn't be crazy to see C# used as well. The ship hasn't sailed, but when they get to the ship it better be good enough.

C# does not compete with Python or Ruby. It competes with Java, which is already entrenched.

OP is suggesting that C# is competing with languages people are picking to replace Ruby or Python. A recent example is Parse[1] moving to Go. C# and .NET was their second choice.

[1]http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-t...

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