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Pretty sad to see. Although I have no significant proof to back my feelings, I sort of feel that the .NET ecosystem is still very corporate-minded and open sour

Pretty sad to see. Although I have no significant proof to back my feelings, I sort of feel that the .NET ecosystem is still very corporate-minded and open source is not getting the love it deserves from the community. That is especially sad because modern C# and .NET are great tools for writing software.

8-prime 2y ago
Yeah, with all the recent libraries going paid its looking pretty grim. Microsoft building their own version of many of the large libraries rather than just supporting them isn't helping either.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  Microsoft seems doomed either way. Microsoft tried to drop their own implementations of OpenID/OAuth providers and they tried supporting IdentityServer and made it a part of some base templates and IdentityServer said that was the reason they "needed" to make it commercial and blamed Microsoft for directing too much traffic their way. If Microsoft builds their own library instead of pointing people to an open source offering it looks like favoritism and competition and "we need to go commercial to survive". If Microsoft points people to an open source offering it looks like "a flood of traffic and we need to go commercial to survive". Microsoft even donates regularly to things like GitHub Sponsorships and the major open source foundations/conservatories, so even in the case of "too much traffic" it isn't like Microsoft is trying to shirk that bill, even though it is very easy to accuse them of that.
DeathArrow 2y ago
> .NET ecosystem is still very corporate-minded and open source is not getting the love it deserves from the community. You mean the same way MongoDB and many other open source products went commercial? It has nothing to do with .NET. It happens with all languages and all platforms.
- donny2018 2y ago
  Redis, Akka, Hashicorp, CockroachDB, etc. Seems to be a common occurrence everywhere.
  - BoorishBears 2y ago
    Feels very rare to have this kind of rug pull at the library level though, it's telling the only library in that list is a Java framework (a fellow 'enterprisey' language). I'm not saying maintainers are obligated to work forever and never ask for money, but it's happened a lot with .NET relative to how package-light development tends to be compared to say Javascript. Automapper and Mediatr just got announced this week. Fluent Assertions (literally just, a fluent API for asserts) recently went commercial. It just feels like there's a certain lethargy in the .NET ecosystem that lends itself to these switch ups. As in, .NET leans slightly towards people banging on your door because their strictly 9-5 enterprise project needs to hit some deliverable and they see their issue as your problem... while JS leans slightly towards tinkerers tinkering with stuff who are often just as needy, but are also slightly more inclined to detour to work with you, and less pressured in general.
- Lachstec 2y ago
  You are absolutely right, that is not a .NET specific issue, it was just very little time between these big libraries going commercial. I think that there is a deeper issue here. Maintaining an open source project is hard work and is rarely compensated, I can even understand the motivation of the mantainers that decided to put their projects under a commercial license. Businesses and developers profit from foss software, but the chances that anything, be it money or support via contributions, is given back are low. I don't think that it is desirable to go closed source to solve that issue, but I also don't have a good solution at hand.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    I think only MassTransit among them has any potential for "material" consequences. MediatR and Automapper were candidates for removal/factoring out in modern applications even before the announcement (mediatr is a bit controversial because it is often misused and makes logic harder to follow but is popular regardless). For MassTransit, I think enterprises which use it will have to decide if they want to stay for now on v8 and develop it by themselves or pay for v9, or migrate elsewhere. Luckily, there are quite a few choices for messaging from Kafka to NATS to Pulsar and RabbitMQ is used almost everywhere anyway. Or you can do gRPC streams, or SignalR. Pick your requirements and you have many good choices.
moomin 2y ago
I think the real effect here is the .NET community is small and they all know each other. When people start thinking this way, it only takes a conference meetup for them to spread their opinion to the entire community.
pjmlp 2y ago
It gets love alright, the same as in other ecosystems, using tools without paying the authors. Not everyone is employed at big corp, with enough time to keep FOSS tooling as side gig. Maybe if everyone gave back as they expect to be paid themselves, this wouldn't be a common thing. Turns out shareware and demos was a better business model than FOSS giving everything away, unless one is building a portfolio for being hired.

8-prime 2y ago

Yeah, with all the recent libraries going paid its looking pretty grim. Microsoft building their own version of many of the large libraries rather than just supporting them isn't helping either.

WorldMaker 2y ago
Microsoft seems doomed either way. Microsoft tried to drop their own implementations of OpenID/OAuth providers and they tried supporting IdentityServer and made it a part of some base templates and IdentityServer said that was the reason they "needed" to make it commercial and blamed Microsoft for directing too much traffic their way. If Microsoft builds their own library instead of pointing people to an open source offering it looks like favoritism and competition and "we need to go commercial to survive". If Microsoft points people to an open source offering it looks like "a flood of traffic and we need to go commercial to survive". Microsoft even donates regularly to things like GitHub Sponsorships and the major open source foundations/conservatories, so even in the case of "too much traffic" it isn't like Microsoft is trying to shirk that bill, even though it is very easy to accuse them of that.

DeathArrow 2y ago

> .NET ecosystem is still very corporate-minded and open source is not getting the love it deserves from the community. You mean the same way MongoDB and many other open source products went commercial? It has nothing to do with .NET. It happens with all languages and all platforms.

donny2018 2y ago
Redis, Akka, Hashicorp, CockroachDB, etc. Seems to be a common occurrence everywhere.
- BoorishBears 2y ago
  Feels very rare to have this kind of rug pull at the library level though, it's telling the only library in that list is a Java framework (a fellow 'enterprisey' language). I'm not saying maintainers are obligated to work forever and never ask for money, but it's happened a lot with .NET relative to how package-light development tends to be compared to say Javascript. Automapper and Mediatr just got announced this week. Fluent Assertions (literally just, a fluent API for asserts) recently went commercial. It just feels like there's a certain lethargy in the .NET ecosystem that lends itself to these switch ups. As in, .NET leans slightly towards people banging on your door because their strictly 9-5 enterprise project needs to hit some deliverable and they see their issue as your problem... while JS leans slightly towards tinkerers tinkering with stuff who are often just as needy, but are also slightly more inclined to detour to work with you, and less pressured in general.
Lachstec 2y ago
You are absolutely right, that is not a .NET specific issue, it was just very little time between these big libraries going commercial. I think that there is a deeper issue here. Maintaining an open source project is hard work and is rarely compensated, I can even understand the motivation of the mantainers that decided to put their projects under a commercial license. Businesses and developers profit from foss software, but the chances that anything, be it money or support via contributions, is given back are low. I don't think that it is desirable to go closed source to solve that issue, but I also don't have a good solution at hand.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  I think only MassTransit among them has any potential for "material" consequences. MediatR and Automapper were candidates for removal/factoring out in modern applications even before the announcement (mediatr is a bit controversial because it is often misused and makes logic harder to follow but is popular regardless). For MassTransit, I think enterprises which use it will have to decide if they want to stay for now on v8 and develop it by themselves or pay for v9, or migrate elsewhere. Luckily, there are quite a few choices for messaging from Kafka to NATS to Pulsar and RabbitMQ is used almost everywhere anyway. Or you can do gRPC streams, or SignalR. Pick your requirements and you have many good choices.

moomin 2y ago

I think the real effect here is the .NET community is small and they all know each other. When people start thinking this way, it only takes a conference meetup for them to spread their opinion to the entire community.

pjmlp 2y ago

It gets love alright, the same as in other ecosystems, using tools without paying the authors. Not everyone is employed at big corp, with enough time to keep FOSS tooling as side gig. Maybe if everyone gave back as they expect to be paid themselves, this wouldn't be a common thing. Turns out shareware and demos was a better business model than FOSS giving everything away, unless one is building a portfolio for being hired.