12 ms·

The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

172 points by berberich 11y ago

MichaelGG 11y ago
Edit: Perhaps this comment is gratuitously negative. Nonetheless I'm not going to delete it because all these things contribute to why people have avoided MS/Windows and hence .NET. (Mono's great and has worked well for me in some scenarios, but, say, with ASP.NET/EF it hasn't been totally stable like the CLR.) I've also invested a ton of time into using MS and promoting them (MVP at one point), so I think I'm rather fair on my criticism. Don't blame Microsoft? Ha, OK. MS is responsible for gimping the .net environment to Windows with no technical reason. I'm a bit of an MS fanboy but I'll admit deploying on Windows is a pain in the ass. Shit, it's just now they're getting around to "Windows Server Nano'. OpenVZ's been around for a long time, and MS just steadfastly ignored containers as long as they could. Or DRBD - 2015, and MS ships nothing like this. Everything is commercial 3rd party stuff. Or look at SSH support. It's just now they decided to add that, despite wanting to do it internally for a while. WinRM is annoying but that didn't stop them from leaving it as the only option. And before that? Deployment was what, exposing smb shares? Or look at IIS. It's 2015, IIS has no real reverse proxy (ARR is a terrible joke), and nginx only runs with limitations on Windows. Why is that? And FFS, they're making you upgrade the OS to have HTTP2, and this whole time, you've not been able to use SPDY. I've seen .net/win shops add Linux just for nginx/SPDY, then realize the grass is greener... Not to mention every other thing, like Elasticsearch - Linux is the OS of choice for deployment, so why bother dealing with it on Windows? .NET was designed from the beginning to be cross platform and cross language. The first book I read on targeting the CLR was for Component Pascal! The CLR design is far better than the JVM. And around that time, MS had a version of .net running on BSD. They chose to ignore developers and thus everyone flocked to the JVM. This is entirely MS's fault. They could have destroyed Java (or at least started an arms race). The JVM was built solely for Java the language, with no thought for running other languages the CLR was designed explicitly with this in mind, yet almost no langs target the CLR. Explain that without blaming MS. Even now, they have F#, which is essentially better than C# in every way. How do they promote it? By fucking up features in Visual Studio so things don't quite work. By downplaying it as a language for "scientific" and "financial" work. This is the team that brought generics to .net; without them they'd probably have Java's lameass erasure model. And it looks like MS just grudgingly throws a bit of F# support out as a bone. They don't get it. Instead MS focuses on their line-of-business "Mort" developers. (The kind that can pump out useless, scammy crap to get the Windows Store numbers up, or contribute to more licenses.) They're focused on ops that suit companies that run AD and Exchange. Excellent solutions for those companies; no real focus on others. I'm sure it's been a great win for immediate licenses, but they shouldn't be surprised they lost the war. (And note that via BizSpark, they're giving this stuff away and still can't make it stick.) And it's not their fault people don't rush to implement code that will possibly only work on Windows? Ha! (MS has finally shifted to being open towards Linux because they wanna sell overpriced VMs on Azure. And by overpriced, I mean 2x or more of GCE's cost, with none of the perf benefits. And note this was not MS's first choice. They wanted Azure to be a lock-in PaaS, and only when they realised customers didn't want to deal with that mess did they go after IaaS and start "embracing" open source and Linux.) I apologize for the rant, but I do blame MS for doing all they can to drive developers and ops away from Windows, .Net's only officially supported platform, and thus away from .Net.
- sudioStudio64 11y ago
  You make it sound like the ops for AD and Exchange type businesses is some bad thing. It's a huge installed base. It's massive. they provide revenue. Open source dev stacks build mindshare not direct revenue. Yes, they were slow to adapt to the changes that happened in the last decade. They seem to be turning it around. Why the emotions?
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    I didn't mean that to sound bad. Exchange is great! Servicing those customers is smart and fine. But MS focused on them to the point of excluding everyone else, intentionally. (See the SSH announcement, how the tech team tried to do it since v1, but management refused approval.) MS knew they had lock in, went down that path exclusively, and is now trying to catch up because the cool kids left them behind.
    - sudioStudio64 11y ago
      I'll give you that. Cheers.
platz 11y ago
previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7987113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7987113
jerven 11y ago
Instead of re implementing could something like ikvm work for their users/usecases?
- hokkos 11y ago
  IKVM is slower than JVM and more error prone, so for big class of work why bother if you can directly use the JVM ?
  - jerven 11y ago
    Yes and I completely agree, but a slow AKKA seems easier than rewriting if from scratch in C#. e.g. seemed a smaller investment to me.
    - RogerAlsing 11y ago
      Akka.net wasnt really intended to be a complete port from the start, it was a weekend hack from my part that then grew into what later became akka.net when Aaron joined (akka.actor and akka.remote first). Then things took off and it got a life of its own. Now there is an entire sub-ecosystem growing around it in terms of persistence providers, testkits and dependency injection lib integrations. AWESOME to see :)
cbsmith 11y ago
Alternate title: "It's hard to build a church on top of a native american burial ground."
- lectrick 11y ago
  I liked this analogy. Why is it getting downvoted? It's totally true. Too much cognitive dissonance between open-source on a for-profit foundation.
  - UK-AL 11y ago
    Tons of open source software is developed by for profit companies???
    - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
      Not so much where the profit comes from selling software. If Microsoft open sourced Windows and Office they would instantly stop making money, hence they will always have an uncomfortable relationship with open source.
      - lectrick 11y ago
        > If Microsoft open sourced Windows and Office they would instantly stop making money It's funny because I don't actually think this is the case. Not completely, anyway. That's their fear, but I think that the upside in the end would counteract the immediate downside. It could also be structured interestingly- Basic Windows could be free, but certain diffs/patches/drivers could be for-pay (such as higher-performant stuff, graphics stuff etc.) A mix of free OS and proprietary profitable stuff. They could also employ an army of Windows consultants...
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        > If Microsoft open sourced Windows and Office they would instantly stop making money If Microsoft open-sourced Windows and Office and offered enterprise technical support contracts at the same price they offered enterprise licensing contracts for the same level of support that was included in those contracts, they'd probably keep making money, though perhaps somewhat less (they'd probably decrease costs, though, as well, since both the administrative side of license management and building license enforcement mechanisms into all your software has a cost.)
sremani 11y ago
The level intellectual laziness is immense. Most of the developers, me included look at Microsoft for guidance than embracing hard problems and solving it for ourselves. This does not mean .net is filled with incompetent programmers but it is full of "unless you pay" programmers.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  You mean the "At least I don't have to use Java" developers?
  - bitmapbrother 11y ago
    I think he meant the "developing for a locked in and dead ecosystem" developers.
- CmonDev 11y ago
  > ...than embracing hard problems and solving it for ourselves... Can you clarify: you mean implementing custom solutions at employer's cost or solving employer's tech problems in your own time?
bigdubs 11y ago
The OSS "weaknesses" of .net are a chicken and an egg problem; the more people who come from a community software background that use a framework, the more community software there will be for that framework. Having what reads as a very angry and negative blogpost about the state of .net oss isn't really helping. Contributing software is though, and that really should have been the focus of the post, not how weak and terrible .net oss is. Be the change you seek.
- crescentfresh 11y ago
  > Be the change you seek He is: https://petabridge.com/about/ https://petabridge.com/about/
  - bigdubs 11y ago
    I wasn't saying he hadn't, in fact right above that line I acknowledged that he had. This is more for .net devs generally.
- taco_emoji 11y ago
  I hate this attitude that negativity is unproductive. Pointing out a problem, articulating its impacts, and hypothesizing about its causes are essential steps to effective problem solving. And I further abhor the notion that anger is not useful. Anger gets attention, and passion elicits empathy and thoughtfulness. Anger is motivating. Anger is a rejection of despair, which is the real enemy of change.
  - bigdubs 11y ago
    Do you respond well when someone yells at you? Honest question. In a lot of cultures anger is seen as weakness, it's the person giving into negativity. It's also seen as hostile. I don't attribute "passion" to someone who is angry. You can be angry without being passionate, and vice versa. Some people are just bitter. I'm honestly really surprised by this response.
    - 11y ago
mshenfield 11y ago
TLDR: .NET developers need to start tackling bigger problems and open source the solutions.
hokkos 11y ago
The fact that until recently .Net only run correctly on windows where the licensing is more expansive than linux, and that all the big player use linux to develop their cloud capacities; it means that the ones who seek to develop at scale didn't bother with .net. Now that .net is open source, MS has still at lot of work to fix all the issues on linux, but maybe the ship has sailed and developer won't bother to port on .net all the hard work done for java as they are really similar.
- 0xCMP 11y ago
  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.
  - dozzie 11y ago
    C# does not compete with Python or Ruby. It competes with Java, which is already entrenched.
    - edgyswingset 11y ago
      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-to-go-and-saved-our-sanity/ http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-t...
mkesper 11y ago
The shortcomings of .NET’s open source ecosystem are your fault and my fault, not Microsoft’s. Do not point the finger at them. Actually, maybe blame them for Windows Server’s consumer-app-hostile licensing model. That merits some blame. Well, Microsoft itself created a whole ecosystem of the proprietary lock-in type. Only very recently they seem to jump on the open source bandwagon. And don't hold your breath for a free software MS office...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
platz 11y ago
My perception is that F# is attracting the open source folks in the .Net community http://tomasp.net/blog/2015/why-fsharp-in-2015/ http://tomasp.net/blog/2015/why-fsharp-in-2015/
- cies 11y ago
  But we all know F# is a gateway drug to... :)
  - ane 11y ago
    OCaml!
- daxfohl 11y ago
  Ironically, I love F# but still waiting for F# on JVM before beginning any serious work.
  - sirseal 11y ago
    Do you really believe that it'll ever be on the JVM? Why would Microsoft put any effort into that? CLR is now cross platform. If you want functional programming that is similar in style to F# (and ML-family of languages), check out Scala.
  - srean 11y ago
    Yet more irony: One of its prime attractions is that it is not tied to JVM. JVM is a pretty well optimized system till you have to touch JNI
  - sklogic 11y ago
    JVM is incapable of running anything like F# efficiently.
    - ectoplasm 11y ago
      How come?
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Then don't use .Net. While there are exceptions, the .Net community hasn't ever really been about OSS.
UK-AL 11y ago
Because they'll stick to one solution. For distributed computing most people use something like NServiceBus, which is by far the most popular solution.
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.
lectrick 11y ago
I'm glad that Microsoft is absorbing enough young guys who went through college realizing open-source is cool to actually influence their future direction, but based on the entire self-interested history of Microsoft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish or http://www.pcworld.com/article/2901262/microsoft-tightens-windows-10s-secure-boot-screws-where-does-that-leave-linux.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2901262/microsoft-tightens-wi... or http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/microsoft-management-mocks-open-source/ http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/microsoft-management-mocks-...) and especially its deep insecurity around, AND open hostility towards, open source, they can truly go fuck themselves. I know the latter is a downvotable attitude, and I apologize because it's very unlike me, but it is one of my few sore points, and this comes from years of web developer hell dealing with IE, years of working at places which only considered solutions that Microsoft invented, years of dealing with Microsoft BS left and right. Before you downvote- If you honestly consider yourself a developer who cares about their craft and career, I want you to read these 2 books- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar and http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html (yes, I just plugged a pg book on HN... It's part of why I'm here, actually!). And THEN come back and try to downvote me.
- bphogan 11y ago
  Lots of downvotes, but I can relate to what you are saying. 10 years of working in a pro Microsoft organization trying to do PHP and Ruby development showed me that developers and managers alike bought into Microsoft's ideas at the time. Microsoft was good, Microsoft offered support, and open-source was just for hobbyists. 10 years of working with servers that were hostile towards openness, and 10 years of watching Microsoft blatantly steal from open-source and not give back. Now they're giving back. And that's great. But I was involved with IronRuby. And I will never trust MS and open-source after that all went down. I'm a big fan of Chocolatey.org, and I'm hearing that MS wants to do their own version of that too. The more things change...
  - lectrick 11y ago
daxfohl 11y ago
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 to drive them.
- j_s 11y ago
  Nearly all of Microsoft's "invented here syndrome" is actually re-invented (often just different enough to be annoying). Things are changing though lately, which is a good thing.
  - mizzao 11y ago
    Yep - the adoption of git has been a great example of the latter.
- buckbova 11y ago
  > 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 This is not exactly true. MS recommends other technologies when they fit. Like Redis for caching on azure. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cache-dotnet-how-to-use-azure-redis-cache/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cac...
  - maxlybbert 11y ago
    That's certainly a new approach for Microsoft. They have a long history of writing things that are clearly inspired by open source projects, but failing to mention the inspiration: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppFabric_Caching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppFabric_Caching vs memcached * https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa904937%28v=vs.85%29.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa9... vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futex * https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb968799%28v=vs.85%29.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb9... vs rsync
macintux 11y ago
I asked on Twitter long ago for any prominent examples of open source software that originated on Windows and transitioned to other platforms. I think after some discussion we may have come up with an example. Maybe. I certainly can't recall what it was.
- saosebastiao 11y ago
  And to the other extreme, I know of quite a few open source projects on .NET that have gone proprietary. ServiceStack anyone? Kinda leaves a little bit of a bitter taste in the mouth.
  - locusm 11y ago
    Well, V3 is still open from memory and very capable.
- CmonDev 11y ago
  http://MonoGame.net http://MonoGame.net
- jameshart 11y ago
  Well, now that Microsoft's open sourced ASP.NET and working on .NET Core, you can add ".NET" to that list.
- innguest 11y ago
  I'm a programmer who started with VB6 on Windows 98 and now I don't even own a partition with Windows installed. When I programmed VB6 I used to go to Planet Source Code (a website) to see what others had done. There was a lot of beginner code samples being posted which helped newbies like me at the time to learn the ropes. Then there were also a few gems from which I learned a lot over a few weeks of studying the same code base. Despite my going back there to see what the community was doing, I never thought of PSC as a place where I can find functions I'm missing. I always used the MSDN library for that (it was incredibly helpful with nice examples). In other words, my mental model was: there's VB6 which comes with all functions I'll ever need (it could call any Win32 API function) and then there's PSC where I go hang out with other people that also code VB6 who want to show or share or teach something to the community. Fast-forward to today - the main language I use at work is Ruby, and it is emblematic of the traits shared by all open-source languages: they do not come with "all functions", in fact most core functions (or what I would consider "core") have been delegated to libraries ("gems" as Ruby calls them). The difference is that my mental model of open-source languages is that they come with barebones functionality and expect the community to contribute with core functions, to the point where basic functionality like HTTP requests have several different libraries modeling the same behavior. Even though I work solely in open-source languages nowadays, I miss the times where as a programmer I could expect my programming language to be self-sufficient in terms of its environment and its functions. A language should bring as many pre-made functions as possible, and guarantee that they work as expected and amongst each other. I should not be expected to rely on unpaid workers for core functionality, documentation, tooling, etc. It is a spectrum. On one end (let's call this side "left") you have Small Scheme and Forth and other barebones languages; on the other end (the "right" side of the spectrum) you have giants like SAP and TIBCO. I'd say Ruby leans to the left and VB6 leaned to the right. I'd also pay very good money for a modern, individual-programmer oriented TIBCO-like environment.
achr2 11y ago
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.
- pistle 11y ago
  Was AvalonDock one?
  - achr2 11y ago
    Indeed.
JamesBarney 11y ago
Here is some blatant speculation about the problem with .NET and OSS. The the larger problem is one of self-selection. C# devs are not alone in not contributing to opens source software. The vast majority of devs don't make meaningful contributions to OSS. It's just the the few people who get really stoked about open source software and love making a positive contribution to world through software have been turned off by Microsoft's behavior for the last 10-15 years. So they never entered the .NET/C# world to begin with. The second is incentives. Java shops are much more comfortable with open source then .NET shops. Open source is still terrifying to many enterprise customers, and a lot of .NET shops. And the incentives besides making a positive contribution to the world [0] for contributing to OSS are it looks good on your resume, maybe you could consult on it, and getting to be paid to work on your own OSS project. But with most customers not using OSS the developers don't get a lot of personal benefits from it. The third is how bug fixing your favorite OSS acts like a gateway drugs. In the past .NET devs wouldn't have very much experience with any OSS. If they found a bug in their favorite framework they would report it. End of story. Everything they used was closed source MS stack. But if they were working with Java(and probably working on an OSS library) they could dive into that library and make the fix themselves. Now that all of the core libraries for MS are being open sourced many more devs will start to get familiar with what it's like to be able to make a change to library or framework you use on a daily basis. And hopefully some will catch the OSS bug. I think this will change. As Microsoft pushes more OSS, enterprise customers will see it as less scary. Devs who are into OSS might start considering .Net as an option. And finally devs will start to get a taste of what it's like to get to fix a bug on a framework or library that 1000's of people use. [0] -see point 1 why people who wanna make a positive contribution to world through open source software shy away from being .net developers
- jameshart 11y ago
  "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 last 10-15 years" makes it seem more continuous than the evidence suggests. If you were to describe Microsoft's behavior over the last 10-15 years with respect to open source software, I think a fair assessment would be "improving". I'm not, honestly, trying to be an apologist for this stuff - it was, clearly, Microsoft policy for a long time to deliberately and pretty unscrupulously undermine Linux and Java and open source adoption. It doesn't appear to be policy to compete unfairly any more, and in some cases MS is producing technologies which support usage of non-MS-originated open and open source technologies. Can we begin to move on a little?
therealmarv 11y ago
An old fashioned opensource developer will not contribute to a closed source MS foundation. Ok .net is now opensource but this step is too too late.
AngusMcQuarrie 11y ago
Re: the Akka.Net stuff, there is indeed an implementation of an Actor model framework - Orleans. Now it was developed in house at Microsoft and hasn't gotten a lot of attention from developers other than Microsoft employees, but it's there. https://github.com/dotnet/orleans https://github.com/dotnet/orleans
- platz 11y ago
  It hasn't gotten a lot of attention because Orleans forces you down implementing odd boilerplate and static interfaces which feels very un-actor like.
  - reubenbond 11y ago
    What boilerplate is that? Grain state interfaces are better now, and the Roslyn-based runtime code generator (https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/pull/528 https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/pull/528) is so close to being merged (so you don't have to include anything in your .csproj, even though that's automatic with the NuGet packages). Whatever it is, maybe we can fix it?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gkliot 11y ago
  Please take a look here before making fast judgment. This was done by Ronald Kuhn with our collaboration: https://github.com/akka/akka-meta/blob/master/ComparisonWithOrleans.md https://github.com/akka/akka-meta/blob/master/ComparisonWith...
batou 11y ago
This is right and wrong. Right because yes there could be a ton more open source solutions out there. Also right because most of them are either shit, commercial or abandonware. This is a big problem. We imported a lot of stuff and found it was mostly crap (Nservicebus, justsaying come to mind) Also wrong because a massive portion of what we do is a solved problem on .net. There's not a whole load of stuff to reinvent. What I'd like to point out though is name me one platform I can build stuff for desktop, mobile, web, embedded, plugged into office applications, deployed by a single click from the web, deployed to single machines, deployed to thousands of workstations, will talk to just about anything under the sun from REST, SOAP, WS-*, databases, spreadsheets, document models, message queues, serial ports, pipes, TCP channels, has a request broker and distributed object model and has several data access methods from ORM, SQL, table gateway abstraction and has very decent tooling, provisioning, integrated deployment, testing, profiling and backwards compatibility going back 20 years all out of the box with no glue required? On top of that there's support which is actually very good for everything above. Nope there's only one and Java doesn't come close.
tpetricek 11y ago
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 leading the way here. There are definitely interesting hard problems that are being solved in the F# community. For some larger and fully open source projects that exist out there check out: * http://www.m-brace.net http://www.m-brace.net - A fantastic library for doing interactive cloud computation that takes a slightly different approach than Spark (think "cloud monad" :-)) * http://fslab.org http://fslab.org - A nicely integrated collection of data science libraries with fantastic data access features and R integration (supported by OSS community and a finance company) * http://websharper.com http://websharper.com - An open source library for doing web programming that has a pretty unique integration of client-side programming (translated to JS) with server-side programming * Also, I would like to mention FAKE, Paket and ProjectScaffold (http://fsprojects.github.io/ProjectScaffold http://fsprojects.github.io/ProjectScaffold) which enable the community build OSS libraries with smooth build process and great documentation. Is it impressive compared with longer and more established OSS communities? Maybe not. But those are all things that happened over the last 2 years. It's enough to make me feel that the F# and .NET ecosystems are heading in a good direction.
- edwinnathaniel 11y ago
  Probably it's heading toward where niche ecosystem/platform is today: Haskell, Erlang. But with less uptake because the similar audiences/users of those platforms are less likely to touch Microsoft... (even if they're reaching cross-platforms)
- marpstar 11y ago
  Maybe this is why I'm loving F# more and more as I continue to dive in. I write C# at my day job, but there really is more interesting OSS development going on in F#. The community seems very approachable and I find myself actually wanting to contribute.
- deet 11y ago
mdpm 11y ago
Really the simple issue has always been the same with MS-platform based OSS; People look to MS to provide the canonical frameworks, tools, and libraries. MS is far more used in corporate environments as a portion of their market, and are more subject to business decision making; much of that focused on RAD / designer tooling. There's a different philosophy in the open source world - python, perl, c - none really have 'de facto' answers to persistence, logging, services, etc so There's a plethora of approaches and libraries for any needs. MS provides EF, so you have to defend any alternate solution to business; it's perceived as risky. Even using tools not of MS origin, despite no close surrogate from the 'official' tools (ala Redis, 3rd party libs) is something you have to find approval for. MS tooling is automatically excluded from this. This isn't great for MS either, because they now have to produce these 'ideal' libraries, and the strength of their platform is now judged by library implementations. I'm really not sure what the solution to this problem is unless they really get to sponsoring projects with effort, money, and tooling. They have programs in place for this, and I can see there's a lot of outreach going on for this reason.
- tpetricek 11y ago
  There is a lot of truth in this. I think there is a shift happening slowly that simply needs to progress and happen fully. With more developer stuff coming from Microsoft embracing open-source, people just need to realize that Microsoft is a part of a larger .NET ecosystem space. Not the other way round.
  - mdpm 11y ago
    Absolutely. They've pulled an amazing turnaround, momentum is going to take a while still.
- bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  I've worked on open+closed source in enterprise startups with people that come from both MSFT- and Linux-centric worlds respectively. The MSFT centric-people tend (not all) poo-poo open source as a complete waste of time and/or lack of business savviness (helps competitors too much). There is some open source contributions in such shops, but usually only if it helps (and doesn't seem to hurt) the bottom-line. PS: Unfortunately, most Fortune 2000 enterprise (ms and non-ms shops) abuse the fuck out of open source and give zero back (time, $ or help). I really think there should be some "community charge" funding model which doesn't make it nakedly for-profit but rewards people that contribute, maintain and support useful code that is widely deployed so they're not completely abused as unpaid crowdslaves.
mythz 11y ago
It's due to NIH and the "power of defaults" as soon as MS recommends a library, it effectively kills any chance that an alternative OSS will gain enough mind-share/traction to survive on its own, which a lot of the time given the lack of adoption, OSS Authors end up abandoning the project since the effort to further develop, support and maintain them doesn't justify their negligible impact. You just need to look at the NuGet package statistics to see how pervasive this is in .NET: https://www.nuget.org/stats/packages https://www.nuget.org/stats/packages Out of the top 50 projects, the only packages I see that aren't prescribed defaults shipped in VS.NET Templates are: - NUnit & NUnitTestAdapter - Moq - AutoMapper - log4net NUnit and log4net were originally ported from Java and defined their respective categories in .NET which MS's NIH alternatives aren't able to match (e.g. they don't run on Mono). MS doesn't offer anything comparable to Moq or AutoMapper which explains their success. Reasons why from my 2012 Interview on .NET OSS: http://www.infoq.com/articles/interview-servicestack-2 http://www.infoq.com/articles/interview-servicestack-2 > The .NET platform is like no other; Microsoft has PR channels, Evangelists, MVP Award programs and control over VS.NET that commands a strong influence over .NET mindshare where they're seen as the authoritative voice for the .NET ecosystem to most developers. Historically they've only used their influence to validate their own libraries and frameworks which has contributed to many .NET companies being reluctant to deviate from Microsoft's prescribed technology stacks and explore alternative solutions. This also explains why the .NET Ecosystem is slow at adopting popular technologies (prevalent in other platforms) where they don't gain traction until MS PR validates them, inc: MVC, Testing, NoSQL, MQ's, etc.
WorldWideWayne 11y ago
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?
- dang 11y ago
  > 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.
  - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
    It was taken out after I said it then.
    - dang 11y ago
      Oh yes, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. If that's the bit you were objecting to, I apologize for misreading your comment.
jtwebman 11y ago
The issue with this whole argument is you should use the right language for the job instead of trying to recreate the wheel over and over again. Look at Erlang and Elixir if you need highly scalable fault tolerant systems. It doesn't mean you have to re-write everything in it, break up the application into what makes sense. I guess not everyone thinks like I do.
mcintyre1994 11y ago
Hey, just a heads up - your website is completely unreadable on mobile. http://imgur.com/2VD1grY http://imgur.com/2VD1grY (can't zoom)
bargl 11y ago
Just to add to something I've seen is many places that the Microsoft stack is used open source code is either frowned upon or completely banned. Contributing your (company code) to that is not only against policy but illegal if the company you work for owns the code. I ran into this when working for the government, CSC, and another company. They developed some cool stuff but just didn't want to share...
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  And yet most of us developers learn everything we know by sharing knowledge. So sadly, pathetically ironic.
PretzelFisch 11y ago
I think this is just carry over from years ago when many Enterprise level company's legal team would not let you touch or use open source software. Granted this was mostly do to Microsoft's FUD campaigns. Secondly Microsoft provided a licence framework for .net and allowed third parties to sale their solutions. Finally many .net users would wait for microsoft to provide a solution because MS would offer a support and maintenance contract.
AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
Seems to me its more on the people who solve hard problems than on the current crop of .NET developers - if you are writing a complex game/MMO, AI system or what have you, and you choose to do so in Java, C++ or similar when C# might be the better option, the faults on you not the .NET community. If the whole pool of developers world wide was considered as a big pie, and a certain section of that do these 'hard problems', the solution is to market to them the strengths of .NET. Advocating other parts of the pie who build enterprise apps and who already use .NET that they should suddenly start writing actor systems 'for the good of the framework's OSS cred' seems silly.
- ashmud 11y ago
  (Not directly addressing what you're saying.) A few MMOs have been written using .NET. https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/10247/mmos-based-on-net https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/10247/mmos-based...
  - zamalek 11y ago
    In addition quite a few MMO server "emulators" are written in C# (e.g. Mangos, WGrid).
  - AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
    As well as a tonne of games in general, which I'd argue are 'hard problems' as well. Pillars of Eternity, Endless Legend etc. Though of course none of those are OSS. Would be nice if at least parts of them were as it would certainly help indie game devs like me :)
jimmcslim 11y ago
You want to see a weak OSS ecosystem, have a look at Delphi. Truly dire, but not helped by extremely limited modularity and binary incompatibility between versions.
bliti 11y ago
I've been really trying to go FOSS (or even OSS) with .NET. But the community does not seem to be very open to it. They do upvote, star or otherwise applaud the effor. Yet nobody uses it. Or even makes the effort to try. My experience with the Python community is quite different. People not only accept the work provided, they actually try and use it and give feedback. It feels good to get a pull request improving something you did. The issue might be that .NET has been promoted as closed source by MS for so long. It might take years before the user base warms up to these new changes.
- marpstar 11y ago
  I work with an entire department of C# developers, and frankly I don't think they care at all about OSS or giving back to the community. It's kind of a bummer, but I've tried to generate enthusiasm around open sourcing some of our components and was met with blank stares. We've been a Microsoft shop from the start and it's obvious.
  - bliti 11y ago
    OT: What a coincidence. A friend was talking about cartegraph the other day (talking about .NET and OMSs).
blakeyrat 11y ago
His main argument seems to center around a "reactive socket server middleware" being absent in the .NET ecosystem. I frankly: 1) don't know what that is, and 2) can't even imagine what it could consist of other than a few lines of code exercising System.Net.Sockets.
- felixgallo 11y ago
  then why are you posting, instead of going and learning?
  - trentmb 11y ago
    I regularly ask questions before seeking knowledge on my own, just to check back on my post a few hours/days/weeks later. The point of asking the question is to leverage others experience to guide your learning, and provide a reference for those in the future that have a similar question.
    - felixgallo 11y ago
      The post has no question marks, nor does it seek knowledge. Instead, it makes declarative statements implying that the knowledge is actually probably useless.
      - trentmb 11y ago
        > The post has no question marks Correct. > nor does it seek knowledge. Open to interpretation- when someone claims they don't know what something is, I interpret that as an invitation to explanation, exposition.
  - blakeyrat 11y ago
    I'd much rather someone write a one-sentence description of what the library does in plain English, so I (and everybody else reading the article) could get the "learning" without the "going". Since you didn't tell me what it does, I'll assume you have no idea either. ;)
mcguire 11y ago
In addition to the various theories abounding here, I've got another one: Microsoft has historically never been big in distributed systems specifically. The licenses for their operating systems have always acted to make farms of Windows machines rare. Until fairly recently, the administration approach made it painful. Microsoft had good support for client-server systems, but you did it their way, which wasn't "reactive". Here's a quick question: Anyone know of any networking/distributed system developments that came out of a Microsoft environment?
ams6110 11y ago
Do something mind-blowing instead – use Storm to make a real-time recommendation app for solving the paradox of choice whenever I walk into a 7-11 and try to figure out what to eat. I'm reaching for a word that means "an example which is almost exactly the opposite of the concept it's used to illustrate" -- incongruous?
taylodl 11y ago
1. James Gosling 2. Bill Joy 3. Guy Steele are why people took Java seriously and used it to solve hard problems.
zamalek 11y ago
> I was incredulous when I couldn’t find a developer-friendly implementation of Murmur3 in C# already. I've got Murmur3 for you [1] - you can stream into it if that interests you at all. Here's my unit tests [2] (which are arguably the hard part because the reference tests are strange). I agree with your article, though, a lot needs to be done. E.g. Frustrated with the lack of a .Net diffing lib I went and wrote one based on patience diff [3] and the best I've gotten is one issue. Nobody seems interested in solving problems like the ones you are talking about. [1]: https://gist.github.com/jcdickinson/4bda826eb2e3f58e38c4 https://gist.github.com/jcdickinson/4bda826eb2e3f58e38c4 [2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14747343/murmurhash3-test-vectors/16796118#16796118 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14747343/murmurhash3-test... [3]: https://github.com/jcdickinson/difflib https://github.com/jcdickinson/difflib
Asbostos 11y ago
I'm always disappointed when I hear about .Net being open sourced and .Net running on Linux and so on. Because the discussion completely ignores the existence of desktop applications. If you used Winforms or WPF or DirectX, etc. then you're still locked in to the closed source world and Windows only. I know desktop applications aren't cool anymore, but if you were cool, you wouldn't have used .Net in the first place.
skc 11y ago
How about maybe we've reached a point where there are very few things you can't already do/achieve quite well in C#/.Net without having to dip into OSS land? I'm a C# dev and I keep close tabs on the plethora of tools that become the new cool thing in OSS for other platforms, and maybe it's a case that I don't work on interesting things...but I've never found myself hindered by C#/.Net. In any case, the major OSS tools out there do have .Net ports that are actively maintained, perhaps only the bleeding edge stuff is slow on the uptake.
Olivier26 11y ago
What's missing is a .Net, open, powerful CMS à la Drupal 8. It's hard to understand MS doesn't take this point seriously with its Azure strategy. Orchard CMS is interesting but has little momentum and very few developers.
reubenbond 11y ago
The half-assed actor project mentioned by the article is probably ActorFx - which is an interesting project with some cool ideas. For exammple, you could write actors in a mix of languages like Python, JS, & C#. It had automatic state replication after each turn. Actors were observable, Rx-style. Actor behavior could be specified at runtime: you could effectively throw a JS closure into the cluster and it create an actor out of it. I wonder, though why it became stagnant so soon and never gained momentum. I'm don't know, but I have a theory. The team were using some tech which was semi-secret at the time, which they weren't allowed to talk about: Service Fabric (known as Windows Fabric at the time). Fabric was in use in projects like Lync Server and Service Bus Server, but no one could talk openly about it. How can you develop an open-source distributed system without being able to mention the framework which makes it all possible? Fabric handles ActorFx' high availability, service discovery, code distribution/upgrades, and their state replication. It's pretty difficult... Forum posts asking what this fabric thing was went unanswered and the people who may have been interested in ActorFx just moved on. Regarding Orleans, there were probably a couple of internal actor frameworks in use at some large .NET houses, but they were never released to the public. I think it was more of a cultural issue than a lack of devs: .NET devs weren't used to sharing code. Things are getting better. The community around Orleans is great (come join us on Gitter! https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans) and the ecosystem as a whole feels to be gaining momentum.
FloNeu 11y ago
Hmm... I only experienced one web-technology which was proprietary software and had a strong 'opensource' community, being flash. Always seemed to me, developers using proprietary technologies tend to not share their stuff.

172 points by berberich 11y ago

Edit: Perhaps this comment is gratuitously negative. Nonetheless I'm not going to delete it because all these things contribute to why people have avoided MS/Windows and hence .NET. (Mono's great and has worked well for me in some scenarios, but, say, with ASP.NET/EF it hasn't been totally stable like the CLR.) I've also invested a ton of time into using MS and promoting them (MVP at one point), so I think I'm rather fair on my criticism. Don't blame Microsoft? Ha, OK. MS is responsible for gimping the .net environment to Windows with no technical reason. I'm a bit of an MS fanboy but I'll admit deploying on Windows is a pain in the ass. Shit, it's just now they're getting around to "Windows Server Nano'. OpenVZ's been around for a long time, and MS just steadfastly ignored containers as long as they could. Or DRBD - 2015, and MS ships nothing like this. Everything is commercial 3rd party stuff. Or look at SSH support. It's just now they decided to add that, despite wanting to do it internally for a while. WinRM is annoying but that didn't stop them from leaving it as the only option. And before that? Deployment was what, exposing smb shares? Or look at IIS. It's 2015, IIS has no real reverse proxy (ARR is a terrible joke), and nginx only runs with limitations on Windows. Why is that? And FFS, they're making you upgrade the OS to have HTTP2, and this whole time, you've not been able to use SPDY. I've seen .net/win shops add Linux just for nginx/SPDY, then realize the grass is greener... Not to mention every other thing, like Elasticsearch - Linux is the OS of choice for deployment, so why bother dealing with it on Windows? .NET was designed from the beginning to be cross platform and cross language. The first book I read on targeting the CLR was for Component Pascal! The CLR design is far better than the JVM. And around that time, MS had a version of .net running on BSD. They chose to ignore developers and thus everyone flocked to the JVM. This is entirely MS's fault. They could have destroyed Java (or at least started an arms race). The JVM was built solely for Java the language, with no thought for running other languages the CLR was designed explicitly with this in mind, yet almost no langs target the CLR. Explain that without blaming MS. Even now, they have F#, which is essentially better than C# in every way. How do they promote it? By fucking up features in Visual Studio so things don't quite work. By downplaying it as a language for "scientific" and "financial" work. This is the team that brought generics to .net; without them they'd probably have Java's lameass erasure model. And it looks like MS just grudgingly throws a bit of F# support out as a bone. They don't get it. Instead MS focuses on their line-of-business "Mort" developers. (The kind that can pump out useless, scammy crap to get the Windows Store numbers up, or contribute to more licenses.) They're focused on ops that suit companies that run AD and Exchange. Excellent solutions for those companies; no real focus on others. I'm sure it's been a great win for immediate licenses, but they shouldn't be surprised they lost the war. (And note that via BizSpark, they're giving this stuff away and still can't make it stick.) And it's not their fault people don't rush to implement code that will possibly only work on Windows? Ha! (MS has finally shifted to being open towards Linux because they wanna sell overpriced VMs on Azure. And by overpriced, I mean 2x or more of GCE's cost, with none of the perf benefits. And note this was not MS's first choice. They wanted Azure to be a lock-in PaaS, and only when they realised customers didn't want to deal with that mess did they go after IaaS and start "embracing" open source and Linux.) I apologize for the rant, but I do blame MS for doing all they can to drive developers and ops away from Windows, .Net's only officially supported platform, and thus away from .Net.

sudioStudio64 11y ago
You make it sound like the ops for AD and Exchange type businesses is some bad thing. It's a huge installed base. It's massive. they provide revenue. Open source dev stacks build mindshare not direct revenue. Yes, they were slow to adapt to the changes that happened in the last decade. They seem to be turning it around. Why the emotions?
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  I didn't mean that to sound bad. Exchange is great! Servicing those customers is smart and fine. But MS focused on them to the point of excluding everyone else, intentionally. (See the SSH announcement, how the tech team tried to do it since v1, but management refused approval.) MS knew they had lock in, went down that path exclusively, and is now trying to catch up because the cool kids left them behind.
  - sudioStudio64 11y ago
    I'll give you that. Cheers.

platz 11y ago

previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7987113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7987113

jerven 11y ago

Instead of re implementing could something like ikvm work for their users/usecases?

hokkos 11y ago
IKVM is slower than JVM and more error prone, so for big class of work why bother if you can directly use the JVM ?
- jerven 11y ago
  Yes and I completely agree, but a slow AKKA seems easier than rewriting if from scratch in C#. e.g. seemed a smaller investment to me.
  - RogerAlsing 11y ago
    Akka.net wasnt really intended to be a complete port from the start, it was a weekend hack from my part that then grew into what later became akka.net when Aaron joined (akka.actor and akka.remote first). Then things took off and it got a life of its own. Now there is an entire sub-ecosystem growing around it in terms of persistence providers, testkits and dependency injection lib integrations. AWESOME to see :)

cbsmith 11y ago

Alternate title: "It's hard to build a church on top of a native american burial ground."

lectrick 11y ago
I liked this analogy. Why is it getting downvoted? It's totally true. Too much cognitive dissonance between open-source on a for-profit foundation.
- UK-AL 11y ago
  Tons of open source software is developed by for profit companies???
  - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
    Not so much where the profit comes from selling software. If Microsoft open sourced Windows and Office they would instantly stop making money, hence they will always have an uncomfortable relationship with open source.
    - lectrick 11y ago
      > If Microsoft open sourced Windows and Office they would instantly stop making money It's funny because I don't actually think this is the case. Not completely, anyway. That's their fear, but I think that the upside in the end would counteract the immediate downside. It could also be structured interestingly- Basic Windows could be free, but certain diffs/patches/drivers could be for-pay (such as higher-performant stuff, graphics stuff etc.) A mix of free OS and proprietary profitable stuff. They could also employ an army of Windows consultants...
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > If Microsoft open sourced Windows and Office they would instantly stop making money If Microsoft open-sourced Windows and Office and offered enterprise technical support contracts at the same price they offered enterprise licensing contracts for the same level of support that was included in those contracts, they'd probably keep making money, though perhaps somewhat less (they'd probably decrease costs, though, as well, since both the administrative side of license management and building license enforcement mechanisms into all your software has a cost.)

sremani 11y ago

The level intellectual laziness is immense. Most of the developers, me included look at Microsoft for guidance than embracing hard problems and solving it for ourselves. This does not mean .net is filled with incompetent programmers but it is full of "unless you pay" programmers.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
You mean the "At least I don't have to use Java" developers?
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  I think he meant the "developing for a locked in and dead ecosystem" developers.
CmonDev 11y ago
> ...than embracing hard problems and solving it for ourselves... Can you clarify: you mean implementing custom solutions at employer's cost or solving employer's tech problems in your own time?

bigdubs 11y ago

The OSS "weaknesses" of .net are a chicken and an egg problem; the more people who come from a community software background that use a framework, the more community software there will be for that framework. Having what reads as a very angry and negative blogpost about the state of .net oss isn't really helping. Contributing software is though, and that really should have been the focus of the post, not how weak and terrible .net oss is. Be the change you seek.

crescentfresh 11y ago
> Be the change you seek He is: https://petabridge.com/about/ https://petabridge.com/about/
- bigdubs 11y ago
  I wasn't saying he hadn't, in fact right above that line I acknowledged that he had. This is more for .net devs generally.
taco_emoji 11y ago
I hate this attitude that negativity is unproductive. Pointing out a problem, articulating its impacts, and hypothesizing about its causes are essential steps to effective problem solving. And I further abhor the notion that anger is not useful. Anger gets attention, and passion elicits empathy and thoughtfulness. Anger is motivating. Anger is a rejection of despair, which is the real enemy of change.
- bigdubs 11y ago
  Do you respond well when someone yells at you? Honest question. In a lot of cultures anger is seen as weakness, it's the person giving into negativity. It's also seen as hostile. I don't attribute "passion" to someone who is angry. You can be angry without being passionate, and vice versa. Some people are just bitter. I'm honestly really surprised by this response.
  - 11y ago

mshenfield 11y ago

TLDR: .NET developers need to start tackling bigger problems and open source the solutions.

hokkos 11y ago

The fact that until recently .Net only run correctly on windows where the licensing is more expansive than linux, and that all the big player use linux to develop their cloud capacities; it means that the ones who seek to develop at scale didn't bother with .net. Now that .net is open source, MS has still at lot of work to fix all the issues on linux, but maybe the ship has sailed and developer won't bother to port on .net all the hard work done for java as they are really similar.

0xCMP 11y ago
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.
- dozzie 11y ago
  C# does not compete with Python or Ruby. It competes with Java, which is already entrenched.
  - edgyswingset 11y ago
    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-to-go-and-saved-our-sanity/ http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-t...

mkesper 11y ago

The shortcomings of .NET’s open source ecosystem are your fault and my fault, not Microsoft’s. Do not point the finger at them. Actually, maybe blame them for Windows Server’s consumer-app-hostile licensing model. That merits some blame. Well, Microsoft itself created a whole ecosystem of the proprietary lock-in type. Only very recently they seem to jump on the open source bandwagon. And don't hold your breath for a free software MS office...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

platz 11y ago

My perception is that F# is attracting the open source folks in the .Net community http://tomasp.net/blog/2015/why-fsharp-in-2015/ http://tomasp.net/blog/2015/why-fsharp-in-2015/

cies 11y ago
But we all know F# is a gateway drug to... :)
- ane 11y ago
  OCaml!
daxfohl 11y ago
Ironically, I love F# but still waiting for F# on JVM before beginning any serious work.
- sirseal 11y ago
  Do you really believe that it'll ever be on the JVM? Why would Microsoft put any effort into that? CLR is now cross platform. If you want functional programming that is similar in style to F# (and ML-family of languages), check out Scala.
- srean 11y ago
  Yet more irony: One of its prime attractions is that it is not tied to JVM. JVM is a pretty well optimized system till you have to touch JNI
- sklogic 11y ago
  JVM is incapable of running anything like F# efficiently.
  - ectoplasm 11y ago
    How come?

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

Then don't use .Net. While there are exceptions, the .Net community hasn't ever really been about OSS.

UK-AL 11y ago

Because they'll stick to one solution. For distributed computing most people use something like NServiceBus, which is by far the most popular solution.

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.

lectrick 11y ago

I'm glad that Microsoft is absorbing enough young guys who went through college realizing open-source is cool to actually influence their future direction, but based on the entire self-interested history of Microsoft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish or http://www.pcworld.com/article/2901262/microsoft-tightens-windows-10s-secure-boot-screws-where-does-that-leave-linux.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2901262/microsoft-tightens-wi... or http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/microsoft-management-mocks-open-source/ http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/microsoft-management-mocks-...) and especially its deep insecurity around, AND open hostility towards, open source, they can truly go fuck themselves. I know the latter is a downvotable attitude, and I apologize because it's very unlike me, but it is one of my few sore points, and this comes from years of web developer hell dealing with IE, years of working at places which only considered solutions that Microsoft invented, years of dealing with Microsoft BS left and right. Before you downvote- If you honestly consider yourself a developer who cares about their craft and career, I want you to read these 2 books- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar and http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html (yes, I just plugged a pg book on HN... It's part of why I'm here, actually!). And THEN come back and try to downvote me.

bphogan 11y ago
Lots of downvotes, but I can relate to what you are saying. 10 years of working in a pro Microsoft organization trying to do PHP and Ruby development showed me that developers and managers alike bought into Microsoft's ideas at the time. Microsoft was good, Microsoft offered support, and open-source was just for hobbyists. 10 years of working with servers that were hostile towards openness, and 10 years of watching Microsoft blatantly steal from open-source and not give back. Now they're giving back. And that's great. But I was involved with IronRuby. And I will never trust MS and open-source after that all went down. I'm a big fan of Chocolatey.org, and I'm hearing that MS wants to do their own version of that too. The more things change...
- lectrick 11y ago

daxfohl 11y ago

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 to drive them.

j_s 11y ago
Nearly all of Microsoft's "invented here syndrome" is actually re-invented (often just different enough to be annoying). Things are changing though lately, which is a good thing.
- mizzao 11y ago
  Yep - the adoption of git has been a great example of the latter.
buckbova 11y ago
> 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 This is not exactly true. MS recommends other technologies when they fit. Like Redis for caching on azure. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cache-dotnet-how-to-use-azure-redis-cache/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cac...
- maxlybbert 11y ago
  That's certainly a new approach for Microsoft. They have a long history of writing things that are clearly inspired by open source projects, but failing to mention the inspiration: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppFabric_Caching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppFabric_Caching vs memcached * https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa904937%28v=vs.85%29.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa9... vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futex * https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb968799%28v=vs.85%29.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb9... vs rsync

macintux 11y ago

I asked on Twitter long ago for any prominent examples of open source software that originated on Windows and transitioned to other platforms. I think after some discussion we may have come up with an example. Maybe. I certainly can't recall what it was.

saosebastiao 11y ago
And to the other extreme, I know of quite a few open source projects on .NET that have gone proprietary. ServiceStack anyone? Kinda leaves a little bit of a bitter taste in the mouth.
- locusm 11y ago
  Well, V3 is still open from memory and very capable.
CmonDev 11y ago
http://MonoGame.net http://MonoGame.net
jameshart 11y ago
Well, now that Microsoft's open sourced ASP.NET and working on .NET Core, you can add ".NET" to that list.
innguest 11y ago
I'm a programmer who started with VB6 on Windows 98 and now I don't even own a partition with Windows installed. When I programmed VB6 I used to go to Planet Source Code (a website) to see what others had done. There was a lot of beginner code samples being posted which helped newbies like me at the time to learn the ropes. Then there were also a few gems from which I learned a lot over a few weeks of studying the same code base. Despite my going back there to see what the community was doing, I never thought of PSC as a place where I can find functions I'm missing. I always used the MSDN library for that (it was incredibly helpful with nice examples). In other words, my mental model was: there's VB6 which comes with all functions I'll ever need (it could call any Win32 API function) and then there's PSC where I go hang out with other people that also code VB6 who want to show or share or teach something to the community. Fast-forward to today - the main language I use at work is Ruby, and it is emblematic of the traits shared by all open-source languages: they do not come with "all functions", in fact most core functions (or what I would consider "core") have been delegated to libraries ("gems" as Ruby calls them). The difference is that my mental model of open-source languages is that they come with barebones functionality and expect the community to contribute with core functions, to the point where basic functionality like HTTP requests have several different libraries modeling the same behavior. Even though I work solely in open-source languages nowadays, I miss the times where as a programmer I could expect my programming language to be self-sufficient in terms of its environment and its functions. A language should bring as many pre-made functions as possible, and guarantee that they work as expected and amongst each other. I should not be expected to rely on unpaid workers for core functionality, documentation, tooling, etc. It is a spectrum. On one end (let's call this side "left") you have Small Scheme and Forth and other barebones languages; on the other end (the "right" side of the spectrum) you have giants like SAP and TIBCO. I'd say Ruby leans to the left and VB6 leaned to the right. I'd also pay very good money for a modern, individual-programmer oriented TIBCO-like environment.

achr2 11y ago

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.

pistle 11y ago
Was AvalonDock one?
- achr2 11y ago
  Indeed.

JamesBarney 11y ago

Here is some blatant speculation about the problem with .NET and OSS. The the larger problem is one of self-selection. C# devs are not alone in not contributing to opens source software. The vast majority of devs don't make meaningful contributions to OSS. It's just the the few people who get really stoked about open source software and love making a positive contribution to world through software have been turned off by Microsoft's behavior for the last 10-15 years. So they never entered the .NET/C# world to begin with. The second is incentives. Java shops are much more comfortable with open source then .NET shops. Open source is still terrifying to many enterprise customers, and a lot of .NET shops. And the incentives besides making a positive contribution to the world [0] for contributing to OSS are it looks good on your resume, maybe you could consult on it, and getting to be paid to work on your own OSS project. But with most customers not using OSS the developers don't get a lot of personal benefits from it. The third is how bug fixing your favorite OSS acts like a gateway drugs. In the past .NET devs wouldn't have very much experience with any OSS. If they found a bug in their favorite framework they would report it. End of story. Everything they used was closed source MS stack. But if they were working with Java(and probably working on an OSS library) they could dive into that library and make the fix themselves. Now that all of the core libraries for MS are being open sourced many more devs will start to get familiar with what it's like to be able to make a change to library or framework you use on a daily basis. And hopefully some will catch the OSS bug. I think this will change. As Microsoft pushes more OSS, enterprise customers will see it as less scary. Devs who are into OSS might start considering .Net as an option. And finally devs will start to get a taste of what it's like to get to fix a bug on a framework or library that 1000's of people use. [0] -see point 1 why people who wanna make a positive contribution to world through open source software shy away from being .net developers

jameshart 11y ago
"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 last 10-15 years" makes it seem more continuous than the evidence suggests. If you were to describe Microsoft's behavior over the last 10-15 years with respect to open source software, I think a fair assessment would be "improving". I'm not, honestly, trying to be an apologist for this stuff - it was, clearly, Microsoft policy for a long time to deliberately and pretty unscrupulously undermine Linux and Java and open source adoption. It doesn't appear to be policy to compete unfairly any more, and in some cases MS is producing technologies which support usage of non-MS-originated open and open source technologies. Can we begin to move on a little?

therealmarv 11y ago

An old fashioned opensource developer will not contribute to a closed source MS foundation. Ok .net is now opensource but this step is too too late.

AngusMcQuarrie 11y ago

Re: the Akka.Net stuff, there is indeed an implementation of an Actor model framework - Orleans. Now it was developed in house at Microsoft and hasn't gotten a lot of attention from developers other than Microsoft employees, but it's there. https://github.com/dotnet/orleans https://github.com/dotnet/orleans

platz 11y ago
It hasn't gotten a lot of attention because Orleans forces you down implementing odd boilerplate and static interfaces which feels very un-actor like.
- reubenbond 11y ago
  What boilerplate is that? Grain state interfaces are better now, and the Roslyn-based runtime code generator (https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/pull/528 https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/pull/528) is so close to being merged (so you don't have to include anything in your .csproj, even though that's automatic with the NuGet packages). Whatever it is, maybe we can fix it?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gkliot 11y ago
Please take a look here before making fast judgment. This was done by Ronald Kuhn with our collaboration: https://github.com/akka/akka-meta/blob/master/ComparisonWithOrleans.md https://github.com/akka/akka-meta/blob/master/ComparisonWith...

batou 11y ago

This is right and wrong. Right because yes there could be a ton more open source solutions out there. Also right because most of them are either shit, commercial or abandonware. This is a big problem. We imported a lot of stuff and found it was mostly crap (Nservicebus, justsaying come to mind) Also wrong because a massive portion of what we do is a solved problem on .net. There's not a whole load of stuff to reinvent. What I'd like to point out though is name me one platform I can build stuff for desktop, mobile, web, embedded, plugged into office applications, deployed by a single click from the web, deployed to single machines, deployed to thousands of workstations, will talk to just about anything under the sun from REST, SOAP, WS-*, databases, spreadsheets, document models, message queues, serial ports, pipes, TCP channels, has a request broker and distributed object model and has several data access methods from ORM, SQL, table gateway abstraction and has very decent tooling, provisioning, integrated deployment, testing, profiling and backwards compatibility going back 20 years all out of the box with no glue required? On top of that there's support which is actually very good for everything above. Nope there's only one and Java doesn't come close.

tpetricek 11y ago

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 leading the way here. There are definitely interesting hard problems that are being solved in the F# community. For some larger and fully open source projects that exist out there check out: * http://www.m-brace.net http://www.m-brace.net - A fantastic library for doing interactive cloud computation that takes a slightly different approach than Spark (think "cloud monad" :-)) * http://fslab.org http://fslab.org - A nicely integrated collection of data science libraries with fantastic data access features and R integration (supported by OSS community and a finance company) * http://websharper.com http://websharper.com - An open source library for doing web programming that has a pretty unique integration of client-side programming (translated to JS) with server-side programming * Also, I would like to mention FAKE, Paket and ProjectScaffold (http://fsprojects.github.io/ProjectScaffold http://fsprojects.github.io/ProjectScaffold) which enable the community build OSS libraries with smooth build process and great documentation. Is it impressive compared with longer and more established OSS communities? Maybe not. But those are all things that happened over the last 2 years. It's enough to make me feel that the F# and .NET ecosystems are heading in a good direction.

edwinnathaniel 11y ago
Probably it's heading toward where niche ecosystem/platform is today: Haskell, Erlang. But with less uptake because the similar audiences/users of those platforms are less likely to touch Microsoft... (even if they're reaching cross-platforms)
marpstar 11y ago
Maybe this is why I'm loving F# more and more as I continue to dive in. I write C# at my day job, but there really is more interesting OSS development going on in F#. The community seems very approachable and I find myself actually wanting to contribute.
deet 11y ago

mdpm 11y ago

Really the simple issue has always been the same with MS-platform based OSS; People look to MS to provide the canonical frameworks, tools, and libraries. MS is far more used in corporate environments as a portion of their market, and are more subject to business decision making; much of that focused on RAD / designer tooling. There's a different philosophy in the open source world - python, perl, c - none really have 'de facto' answers to persistence, logging, services, etc so There's a plethora of approaches and libraries for any needs. MS provides EF, so you have to defend any alternate solution to business; it's perceived as risky. Even using tools not of MS origin, despite no close surrogate from the 'official' tools (ala Redis, 3rd party libs) is something you have to find approval for. MS tooling is automatically excluded from this. This isn't great for MS either, because they now have to produce these 'ideal' libraries, and the strength of their platform is now judged by library implementations. I'm really not sure what the solution to this problem is unless they really get to sponsoring projects with effort, money, and tooling. They have programs in place for this, and I can see there's a lot of outreach going on for this reason.

tpetricek 11y ago
There is a lot of truth in this. I think there is a shift happening slowly that simply needs to progress and happen fully. With more developer stuff coming from Microsoft embracing open-source, people just need to realize that Microsoft is a part of a larger .NET ecosystem space. Not the other way round.
- mdpm 11y ago
  Absolutely. They've pulled an amazing turnaround, momentum is going to take a while still.
bmir-alum-007 11y ago
I've worked on open+closed source in enterprise startups with people that come from both MSFT- and Linux-centric worlds respectively. The MSFT centric-people tend (not all) poo-poo open source as a complete waste of time and/or lack of business savviness (helps competitors too much). There is some open source contributions in such shops, but usually only if it helps (and doesn't seem to hurt) the bottom-line. PS: Unfortunately, most Fortune 2000 enterprise (ms and non-ms shops) abuse the fuck out of open source and give zero back (time, $ or help). I really think there should be some "community charge" funding model which doesn't make it nakedly for-profit but rewards people that contribute, maintain and support useful code that is widely deployed so they're not completely abused as unpaid crowdslaves.

mythz 11y ago

It's due to NIH and the "power of defaults" as soon as MS recommends a library, it effectively kills any chance that an alternative OSS will gain enough mind-share/traction to survive on its own, which a lot of the time given the lack of adoption, OSS Authors end up abandoning the project since the effort to further develop, support and maintain them doesn't justify their negligible impact. You just need to look at the NuGet package statistics to see how pervasive this is in .NET: https://www.nuget.org/stats/packages https://www.nuget.org/stats/packages Out of the top 50 projects, the only packages I see that aren't prescribed defaults shipped in VS.NET Templates are: - NUnit & NUnitTestAdapter - Moq - AutoMapper - log4net NUnit and log4net were originally ported from Java and defined their respective categories in .NET which MS's NIH alternatives aren't able to match (e.g. they don't run on Mono). MS doesn't offer anything comparable to Moq or AutoMapper which explains their success. Reasons why from my 2012 Interview on .NET OSS: http://www.infoq.com/articles/interview-servicestack-2 http://www.infoq.com/articles/interview-servicestack-2 > The .NET platform is like no other; Microsoft has PR channels, Evangelists, MVP Award programs and control over VS.NET that commands a strong influence over .NET mindshare where they're seen as the authoritative voice for the .NET ecosystem to most developers. Historically they've only used their influence to validate their own libraries and frameworks which has contributed to many .NET companies being reluctant to deviate from Microsoft's prescribed technology stacks and explore alternative solutions. This also explains why the .NET Ecosystem is slow at adopting popular technologies (prevalent in other platforms) where they don't gain traction until MS PR validates them, inc: MVC, Testing, NoSQL, MQ's, etc.

WorldWideWayne 11y ago

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?

dang 11y ago
> 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.
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  It was taken out after I said it then.
  - dang 11y ago
    Oh yes, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. If that's the bit you were objecting to, I apologize for misreading your comment.

jtwebman 11y ago

The issue with this whole argument is you should use the right language for the job instead of trying to recreate the wheel over and over again. Look at Erlang and Elixir if you need highly scalable fault tolerant systems. It doesn't mean you have to re-write everything in it, break up the application into what makes sense. I guess not everyone thinks like I do.

mcintyre1994 11y ago

Hey, just a heads up - your website is completely unreadable on mobile. http://imgur.com/2VD1grY http://imgur.com/2VD1grY (can't zoom)

bargl 11y ago

Just to add to something I've seen is many places that the Microsoft stack is used open source code is either frowned upon or completely banned. Contributing your (company code) to that is not only against policy but illegal if the company you work for owns the code. I ran into this when working for the government, CSC, and another company. They developed some cool stuff but just didn't want to share...

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
And yet most of us developers learn everything we know by sharing knowledge. So sadly, pathetically ironic.

PretzelFisch 11y ago

I think this is just carry over from years ago when many Enterprise level company's legal team would not let you touch or use open source software. Granted this was mostly do to Microsoft's FUD campaigns. Secondly Microsoft provided a licence framework for .net and allowed third parties to sale their solutions. Finally many .net users would wait for microsoft to provide a solution because MS would offer a support and maintenance contract.

AdeptusAquinas 11y ago

Seems to me its more on the people who solve hard problems than on the current crop of .NET developers - if you are writing a complex game/MMO, AI system or what have you, and you choose to do so in Java, C++ or similar when C# might be the better option, the faults on you not the .NET community. If the whole pool of developers world wide was considered as a big pie, and a certain section of that do these 'hard problems', the solution is to market to them the strengths of .NET. Advocating other parts of the pie who build enterprise apps and who already use .NET that they should suddenly start writing actor systems 'for the good of the framework's OSS cred' seems silly.

ashmud 11y ago
(Not directly addressing what you're saying.) A few MMOs have been written using .NET. https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/10247/mmos-based-on-net https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/10247/mmos-based...
- zamalek 11y ago
  In addition quite a few MMO server "emulators" are written in C# (e.g. Mangos, WGrid).
- AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
  As well as a tonne of games in general, which I'd argue are 'hard problems' as well. Pillars of Eternity, Endless Legend etc. Though of course none of those are OSS. Would be nice if at least parts of them were as it would certainly help indie game devs like me :)

jimmcslim 11y ago

You want to see a weak OSS ecosystem, have a look at Delphi. Truly dire, but not helped by extremely limited modularity and binary incompatibility between versions.

bliti 11y ago

I've been really trying to go FOSS (or even OSS) with .NET. But the community does not seem to be very open to it. They do upvote, star or otherwise applaud the effor. Yet nobody uses it. Or even makes the effort to try. My experience with the Python community is quite different. People not only accept the work provided, they actually try and use it and give feedback. It feels good to get a pull request improving something you did. The issue might be that .NET has been promoted as closed source by MS for so long. It might take years before the user base warms up to these new changes.

marpstar 11y ago
I work with an entire department of C# developers, and frankly I don't think they care at all about OSS or giving back to the community. It's kind of a bummer, but I've tried to generate enthusiasm around open sourcing some of our components and was met with blank stares. We've been a Microsoft shop from the start and it's obvious.
- bliti 11y ago
  OT: What a coincidence. A friend was talking about cartegraph the other day (talking about .NET and OMSs).

blakeyrat 11y ago

His main argument seems to center around a "reactive socket server middleware" being absent in the .NET ecosystem. I frankly: 1) don't know what that is, and 2) can't even imagine what it could consist of other than a few lines of code exercising System.Net.Sockets.

felixgallo 11y ago
then why are you posting, instead of going and learning?
- trentmb 11y ago
  I regularly ask questions before seeking knowledge on my own, just to check back on my post a few hours/days/weeks later. The point of asking the question is to leverage others experience to guide your learning, and provide a reference for those in the future that have a similar question.
  - felixgallo 11y ago
    The post has no question marks, nor does it seek knowledge. Instead, it makes declarative statements implying that the knowledge is actually probably useless.
    - trentmb 11y ago
      > The post has no question marks Correct. > nor does it seek knowledge. Open to interpretation- when someone claims they don't know what something is, I interpret that as an invitation to explanation, exposition.
- blakeyrat 11y ago
  I'd much rather someone write a one-sentence description of what the library does in plain English, so I (and everybody else reading the article) could get the "learning" without the "going". Since you didn't tell me what it does, I'll assume you have no idea either. ;)

mcguire 11y ago

In addition to the various theories abounding here, I've got another one: Microsoft has historically never been big in distributed systems specifically. The licenses for their operating systems have always acted to make farms of Windows machines rare. Until fairly recently, the administration approach made it painful. Microsoft had good support for client-server systems, but you did it their way, which wasn't "reactive". Here's a quick question: Anyone know of any networking/distributed system developments that came out of a Microsoft environment?

ams6110 11y ago

Do something mind-blowing instead – use Storm to make a real-time recommendation app for solving the paradox of choice whenever I walk into a 7-11 and try to figure out what to eat. I'm reaching for a word that means "an example which is almost exactly the opposite of the concept it's used to illustrate" -- incongruous?

taylodl 11y ago

1. James Gosling 2. Bill Joy 3. Guy Steele are why people took Java seriously and used it to solve hard problems.

zamalek 11y ago

> I was incredulous when I couldn’t find a developer-friendly implementation of Murmur3 in C# already. I've got Murmur3 for you [1] - you can stream into it if that interests you at all. Here's my unit tests [2] (which are arguably the hard part because the reference tests are strange). I agree with your article, though, a lot needs to be done. E.g. Frustrated with the lack of a .Net diffing lib I went and wrote one based on patience diff [3] and the best I've gotten is one issue. Nobody seems interested in solving problems like the ones you are talking about. [1]: https://gist.github.com/jcdickinson/4bda826eb2e3f58e38c4 https://gist.github.com/jcdickinson/4bda826eb2e3f58e38c4 [2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14747343/murmurhash3-test-vectors/16796118#16796118 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14747343/murmurhash3-test... [3]: https://github.com/jcdickinson/difflib https://github.com/jcdickinson/difflib

Asbostos 11y ago

I'm always disappointed when I hear about .Net being open sourced and .Net running on Linux and so on. Because the discussion completely ignores the existence of desktop applications. If you used Winforms or WPF or DirectX, etc. then you're still locked in to the closed source world and Windows only. I know desktop applications aren't cool anymore, but if you were cool, you wouldn't have used .Net in the first place.

skc 11y ago

How about maybe we've reached a point where there are very few things you can't already do/achieve quite well in C#/.Net without having to dip into OSS land? I'm a C# dev and I keep close tabs on the plethora of tools that become the new cool thing in OSS for other platforms, and maybe it's a case that I don't work on interesting things...but I've never found myself hindered by C#/.Net. In any case, the major OSS tools out there do have .Net ports that are actively maintained, perhaps only the bleeding edge stuff is slow on the uptake.

Olivier26 11y ago

What's missing is a .Net, open, powerful CMS à la Drupal 8. It's hard to understand MS doesn't take this point seriously with its Azure strategy. Orchard CMS is interesting but has little momentum and very few developers.

reubenbond 11y ago

The half-assed actor project mentioned by the article is probably ActorFx - which is an interesting project with some cool ideas. For exammple, you could write actors in a mix of languages like Python, JS, & C#. It had automatic state replication after each turn. Actors were observable, Rx-style. Actor behavior could be specified at runtime: you could effectively throw a JS closure into the cluster and it create an actor out of it. I wonder, though why it became stagnant so soon and never gained momentum. I'm don't know, but I have a theory. The team were using some tech which was semi-secret at the time, which they weren't allowed to talk about: Service Fabric (known as Windows Fabric at the time). Fabric was in use in projects like Lync Server and Service Bus Server, but no one could talk openly about it. How can you develop an open-source distributed system without being able to mention the framework which makes it all possible? Fabric handles ActorFx' high availability, service discovery, code distribution/upgrades, and their state replication. It's pretty difficult... Forum posts asking what this fabric thing was went unanswered and the people who may have been interested in ActorFx just moved on. Regarding Orleans, there were probably a couple of internal actor frameworks in use at some large .NET houses, but they were never released to the public. I think it was more of a cultural issue than a lack of devs: .NET devs weren't used to sharing code. Things are getting better. The community around Orleans is great (come join us on Gitter! https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans) and the ecosystem as a whole feels to be gaining momentum.

FloNeu 11y ago

Hmm... I only experienced one web-technology which was proprietary software and had a strong 'opensource' community, being flash. Always seemed to me, developers using proprietary technologies tend to not share their stuff.