<story><title>The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem</title><url>http://www.aaronstannard.com/the-profound-weakness-of-the-net-oss-ecosystem/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vdnkh</author><text>Yes, the author is correct. There is a distinct lack of OSS in .NET. I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;m focused on Getting Stuff Done and the .NET library is great for that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bunderbunder</author><text>I think there&amp;#x27;s definitely something to this.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the new Community Edition will change that that situation.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem</title><url>http://www.aaronstannard.com/the-profound-weakness-of-the-net-oss-ecosystem/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vdnkh</author><text>Yes, the author is correct. There is a distinct lack of OSS in .NET. I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;m focused on Getting Stuff Done and the .NET library is great for that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tacos</author><text>The tools and libraries from Microsoft are so solid that frankly you don&amp;#x27;t need an entire class of open source projects.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t need to &amp;quot;contribute&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;socialize&amp;quot; with some Python craziness named after a dolphin (though I did!) because Amazon provides a real .NET SDK for talking to AWS. I don&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;The community around node.js in many ways is an attempt to re-write .NET from the ground up. And they&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;That said -- Microsoft&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;There is a lot more open-source .NET code out there than you&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>