James Vastbinder wonders if open source is the anathema for .NET. In fact I think that .NET has only encouraged open source, and is now available to a wider userbase because of Mono. SharpDevelop was one of the first open source tools I used and was more than just impressed. You had this giant organization releasing studios and express editions, but SharpDevelop represented the true spirit of open source in .NET.
Mono has been another high point for me. Not because it enables Microsoft on other platforms, but because it solves the dilemma in many cases when people want to write code primarily for Microsoft platforms, but also make it portable. The Silverlight port in 21 days is one of the examples of how Mono has helped.
However it is still a case that open source is not as active as it is on other platforms. As Jeff Atwood says:
In short, because open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem. Many highly popular open source projects have contributed so much to the .NET community, and they’ve gotten virtually no support at all from Microsoft in return.
I do not think it is the platform, it is probably the company. In spite of various brushes with open source Microsoft has not encouraged open source development. I believe it is quite possible that Mono and tools built on it will overtake .NET some day because of the open source contribution to it. The open source contribution on .NET and Mono can only increase especially because Microsoft implementations of languages like Python will get contributions from the open source community.
It is time Microsoft pays heed to the open source community and its demand in the .NET world. Otherwise it stands a chance of losing to its own open source ports like Mono.
July 10th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
I believe I read that there will soon be .NET support for Eclipse. That would help significantly as well. Visual Studio is not really the optimal IDE for the periodic developer. Eclipse, however, with its support of so many languages – may help adoption of .NET.
July 11th, 2007 at 2:26 am
Douglas, you don’t seem to understand what this article discusses at all. It’s not talking about IDE’s at all, it’s talking about the cross-platform open source implementations of the .NET framework and how Microsoft isn’t paying any attention to those projects, where they actually should.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:58 am
[...] open source. I think the open source world can thrive in the Microsoft world, especially because of .NET and Mono. But Microsoft has to acknowledge and encourage participation. Which I do not think seems to be [...]