7 ms·

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,

by vdnkh 11y ago

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 of perfectly good OEM ones? At work, I'm focused on Getting Stuff Done and the .NET library is great for that.

hockeybias 11y ago
Agreed.
bunderbunder 11y ago
I think there's definitely something to this. Another that I think makes a big difference is that Microsoft has historically charged money for reasonably featureful versions of their dev tools. I think it leads a lot of people who work in .NET during the day to do hobby work on some other platform. The freely available dev tools for Ruby might not be any more featureful than Visual Studio Express, but the simple fact that you're working on a different platform from the one where you get to work with all these high-end power tools during the day means you notice that difference less. Hopefully the new Community Edition will change that that situation.
tacos 11y ago
The tools and libraries from Microsoft are so solid that frankly you don't need an entire class of open source projects. I don't need to "contribute" and "socialize" with some Python craziness named after a dolphin (though I did!) because Amazon provides a real .NET SDK for talking to AWS. I don't need to wrestle with three different constantly-patched Ruby image libraries because .NET has been able to load and save six kinds of bitmaps via everything from C# to F# to Excel macros since the 90s. The community around node.js in many ways is an attempt to re-write .NET from the ground up. And they're doing an amazing job. But so am I, when I can write three lines of code in a version of F# that shipped six years ago and issue SQL-like data gathering queries over everything from Wikipedia to the Department of Labor. That said -- Microsoft's idiotic forges and weirdo repositories were total incompetent nonsense. And the stupidity with their C compilers -- from strategy to implementation -- presented a brick wall to anything resembling clean cross-platform development, which DAMMIT, is a must. There is a lot more open-source .NET code out there than you'd think. But it tends to be very narrow and very vertical (and often, very high quality) because the core libraries are so broad and so great.
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  You're not wrong. People who don't work in "enterprise" or even in small/medium business IT shops will never know it though. However, I think the downvotes are probably a reaction to the hint of attitude which suggests that you're not overzealous about OSS.
  - eropple 11y ago
    I wonder why, then, the enterprise-by-any-reasonable-standard place I'm currently consulting is moving away from .NET and Windows to a polyglot microservice architecture on Linux. Surely it isn't the severe drag of dealing with C# and the incredible mess of .NET deployment in a rapidly iterating environment (and, to be fair, this is also in part Windows's fault, there's no good disposable-server model for Windows in a cloud environment because the provisioning stuff is not great, so you make bad decisions like persistent servers and Octopus). As it happens, I like C#, as a mostly-portable language for writing video games because the runtime has been ported almost anywhere I care about. I have a lot of open-source C# stuff in my Github and have been doing open-source C# since about 2007. But as an ecosystem for high-velocity, agile work, it's got problems. Maybe CoreCLR on Linux, once the bugs are well and truly killed, will be an answer, but it's not there yet.
    - tacos 11y ago
      "polyglot microservice architectures" eh? Hey Bill! We've got 20 years of legacy code that handles everything from Arrivals Boards to seat assignments in 1627 different aircraft configurations. We got a room full of .NET devs downstairs. How about we re-write everything in multiple languages! Remember that time we went down for two days because we muffed up our NET 2.0 to 4.0 migration? Imagine how much fun we'll have when we're doing it with Python, Ruby, Rust, Swift, Javascript and Go! We'll break out the seat assignments in Go. Do the signboards in Python. Web app for refunds in Ruby. I don't know what Rust is but one of the guys downstairs has a book on it with a woodcut of a beaver on the front. Think of all the time we'll save! Plus our consultant says it's so much easier to spin up Linux VMs! "Bill, it's the same damn button to spin up a Linux server anywhere. Even on Azure. You just check the Penguin instead of the four squares first. And our deploy scripts work just fine. Even our stupidest apps from the 1990s are one binary file and one text file now. And nobody but Tim is allowed to change the text file."
maxlybbert 11y ago
But Java had a lot of open source projects around it before Sun released the source code.
- jasode 11y ago
  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 both have GC, they both have virtual machine intermediate language, etc, etc.) You also have to compare the social factors that built up around each. MS .NET/C# was a continuation of Visual Basic 6.0, Access db, and FoxPro. Those dev tools were used for line-of-business enterprisey apps. Even Microsoft's initial offerings for web dev was ASP WebForms which tried to continue the VB WinForms desktop paradigm into a HTTP/HTML world. That was the social situation around MS dev tools and NET 1.0 continued that. It continues to this day. Java had a different set of social dynamics -- and that also continues to this day -- even though a significant chunk of Java dev is also line-of-business CRUD enterprise apps. If anyone was a hacker or student with no money outside the domain of boring corporate CRUD apps, it was much more likely that he/she would scratch an itch with Java instead of C# (if it was down to a choice between those 2). It is not an accident that new things like Hadoop, Elasticsearch, iText for PDF, etc got written with Java first. Even though there's no technical reason to prevent those projects from getting birthed on C# before Java, the inertia of C#'s community dynamic keeps it from happening. The past matters and it overwhelms any technical equivalence between the platforms.
  - jameshart 11y ago
    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.
fla 11y ago
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.
- fla 11y ago
  s/server-side OSS/server-side software
digler999 11y ago
> 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 !).
bsder 11y ago
> 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. Simple, Microsoft killed it with the transition to .NET. People have forgotten just how extensive both the open and paid ecosystems were around Visual Basic 6 circa 1999-2001. Those ecosystems were huge--they absolutely dwarfed open source ecosystems in the same timeframe. Then Microsoft completely stomped it flat with .NET in 2001. After that, people with two brain cells to rub together figured out the decision matrix really quickly. 1) Stay with VB6 until it finally breaks (still running today) 2) Switch to something non-Microsoft like Java 3) Switch to web-based stuff (Hey this XMLHttpRequest stuff is kind of cool) 4) Port it to Visual C/C++--whoops--the Microsoft C compiler sucks donkey balls 5) Port the code to Microsoft's new crap until they stab me again And then they wonder why, 15 years after shooting their developer ecosystem in the head, their ecosystem is inferior.
- jevgeni 11y ago
  The switch from older (VB6, etc) model to .NET could be compared to the switch from Python 2 to 3, only MS didn't wuss out and actually made the braking change instead of dragging everything out. You can call it "stabbing". I'd call it "necessary progress". Just because an ecosystem is large doesn't mean it's good. I once tried to switch the automation in our team from batch files to Ruby. Huge mistake. Try finding any Ruby gem that: works, has the functionality you need, is well documented, and doesn't rely on Rails (honestly, I don't want to load a whole web framework to figure out a recurring schedule). Went with Powershell in the end and never looked back.
  - craigmcnamara 11y ago
    It sounds like you just don't know how to use Ruby and Rake. Rake doesn't depend on Rails and is a system for automating things and resolving dependencies. It's also cross platform(Mac, Linux and Windows) and has plenty of Books, Blogs and documentation. It sounds like you got scared of something you didn't know how to use. I started Ruby with a weekend of study and a background in C++ and Java, and I've been doing it for 7 years. When you try new things, try harder.

by vdnkh 11y ago

hockeybias 11y ago

Agreed.

bunderbunder 11y ago

I think there's definitely something to this. Another that I think makes a big difference is that Microsoft has historically charged money for reasonably featureful versions of their dev tools. I think it leads a lot of people who work in .NET during the day to do hobby work on some other platform. The freely available dev tools for Ruby might not be any more featureful than Visual Studio Express, but the simple fact that you're working on a different platform from the one where you get to work with all these high-end power tools during the day means you notice that difference less. Hopefully the new Community Edition will change that that situation.

tacos 11y ago

The tools and libraries from Microsoft are so solid that frankly you don't need an entire class of open source projects. I don't need to "contribute" and "socialize" with some Python craziness named after a dolphin (though I did!) because Amazon provides a real .NET SDK for talking to AWS. I don't need to wrestle with three different constantly-patched Ruby image libraries because .NET has been able to load and save six kinds of bitmaps via everything from C# to F# to Excel macros since the 90s. The community around node.js in many ways is an attempt to re-write .NET from the ground up. And they're doing an amazing job. But so am I, when I can write three lines of code in a version of F# that shipped six years ago and issue SQL-like data gathering queries over everything from Wikipedia to the Department of Labor. That said -- Microsoft's idiotic forges and weirdo repositories were total incompetent nonsense. And the stupidity with their C compilers -- from strategy to implementation -- presented a brick wall to anything resembling clean cross-platform development, which DAMMIT, is a must. There is a lot more open-source .NET code out there than you'd think. But it tends to be very narrow and very vertical (and often, very high quality) because the core libraries are so broad and so great.

WorldWideWayne 11y ago
You're not wrong. People who don't work in "enterprise" or even in small/medium business IT shops will never know it though. However, I think the downvotes are probably a reaction to the hint of attitude which suggests that you're not overzealous about OSS.
- eropple 11y ago
  I wonder why, then, the enterprise-by-any-reasonable-standard place I'm currently consulting is moving away from .NET and Windows to a polyglot microservice architecture on Linux. Surely it isn't the severe drag of dealing with C# and the incredible mess of .NET deployment in a rapidly iterating environment (and, to be fair, this is also in part Windows's fault, there's no good disposable-server model for Windows in a cloud environment because the provisioning stuff is not great, so you make bad decisions like persistent servers and Octopus). As it happens, I like C#, as a mostly-portable language for writing video games because the runtime has been ported almost anywhere I care about. I have a lot of open-source C# stuff in my Github and have been doing open-source C# since about 2007. But as an ecosystem for high-velocity, agile work, it's got problems. Maybe CoreCLR on Linux, once the bugs are well and truly killed, will be an answer, but it's not there yet.
  - tacos 11y ago
    "polyglot microservice architectures" eh? Hey Bill! We've got 20 years of legacy code that handles everything from Arrivals Boards to seat assignments in 1627 different aircraft configurations. We got a room full of .NET devs downstairs. How about we re-write everything in multiple languages! Remember that time we went down for two days because we muffed up our NET 2.0 to 4.0 migration? Imagine how much fun we'll have when we're doing it with Python, Ruby, Rust, Swift, Javascript and Go! We'll break out the seat assignments in Go. Do the signboards in Python. Web app for refunds in Ruby. I don't know what Rust is but one of the guys downstairs has a book on it with a woodcut of a beaver on the front. Think of all the time we'll save! Plus our consultant says it's so much easier to spin up Linux VMs! "Bill, it's the same damn button to spin up a Linux server anywhere. Even on Azure. You just check the Penguin instead of the four squares first. And our deploy scripts work just fine. Even our stupidest apps from the 1990s are one binary file and one text file now. And nobody but Tim is allowed to change the text file."

maxlybbert 11y ago

But Java had a lot of open source projects around it before Sun released the source code.

jasode 11y ago
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 both have GC, they both have virtual machine intermediate language, etc, etc.) You also have to compare the social factors that built up around each. MS .NET/C# was a continuation of Visual Basic 6.0, Access db, and FoxPro. Those dev tools were used for line-of-business enterprisey apps. Even Microsoft's initial offerings for web dev was ASP WebForms which tried to continue the VB WinForms desktop paradigm into a HTTP/HTML world. That was the social situation around MS dev tools and NET 1.0 continued that. It continues to this day. Java had a different set of social dynamics -- and that also continues to this day -- even though a significant chunk of Java dev is also line-of-business CRUD enterprise apps. If anyone was a hacker or student with no money outside the domain of boring corporate CRUD apps, it was much more likely that he/she would scratch an itch with Java instead of C# (if it was down to a choice between those 2). It is not an accident that new things like Hadoop, Elasticsearch, iText for PDF, etc got written with Java first. Even though there's no technical reason to prevent those projects from getting birthed on C# before Java, the inertia of C#'s community dynamic keeps it from happening. The past matters and it overwhelms any technical equivalence between the platforms.
- jameshart 11y ago
  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.

fla 11y ago

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.

fla 11y ago
s/server-side OSS/server-side software

digler999 11y ago

> 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 !).

bsder 11y ago

> 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. Simple, Microsoft killed it with the transition to .NET. People have forgotten just how extensive both the open and paid ecosystems were around Visual Basic 6 circa 1999-2001. Those ecosystems were huge--they absolutely dwarfed open source ecosystems in the same timeframe. Then Microsoft completely stomped it flat with .NET in 2001. After that, people with two brain cells to rub together figured out the decision matrix really quickly. 1) Stay with VB6 until it finally breaks (still running today) 2) Switch to something non-Microsoft like Java 3) Switch to web-based stuff (Hey this XMLHttpRequest stuff is kind of cool) 4) Port it to Visual C/C++--whoops--the Microsoft C compiler sucks donkey balls 5) Port the code to Microsoft's new crap until they stab me again And then they wonder why, 15 years after shooting their developer ecosystem in the head, their ecosystem is inferior.

jevgeni 11y ago
The switch from older (VB6, etc) model to .NET could be compared to the switch from Python 2 to 3, only MS didn't wuss out and actually made the braking change instead of dragging everything out. You can call it "stabbing". I'd call it "necessary progress". Just because an ecosystem is large doesn't mean it's good. I once tried to switch the automation in our team from batch files to Ruby. Huge mistake. Try finding any Ruby gem that: works, has the functionality you need, is well documented, and doesn't rely on Rails (honestly, I don't want to load a whole web framework to figure out a recurring schedule). Went with Powershell in the end and never looked back.
- craigmcnamara 11y ago
  It sounds like you just don't know how to use Ruby and Rake. Rake doesn't depend on Rails and is a system for automating things and resolving dependencies. It's also cross platform(Mac, Linux and Windows) and has plenty of Books, Blogs and documentation. It sounds like you got scared of something you didn't know how to use. I started Ruby with a weekend of study and a background in C++ and Java, and I've been doing it for 7 years. When you try new things, try harder.