What about sponsoring a competion? Like the XPrize, but you can
call it the NPrize.
That is a brilliant suggestion (in fact, it was one of the ideas I had 
thanks!
I nominate http://www.umbraco.org/
Why? Because itâs not only a .NET 2.0 based open source CMS that runs on MSSQL. Itâs truly the best sweet-spot CMS out there that Iâve seen during my 8 years in the CMS industry. It even won two prices for the best supporting and active community and for itâs excellent integration capabilities at BNP 2006 (http://www.bnp.dk/227.0.html).
Maybe, instead, youâld be better off funding a programme to educate developers in how open source will destroy microsoft, .net, the free world, and their hope of having a career. And make sure you stay away from the evil horrors of the GPL which is the ultimate enemy of all software development - according to the guy in charge of the company that created .NET in the first place.
I have not read all the replies, but I believe that when you âopen sourceâ code, you do it for one of two reasons. Either its your pet project and you want to share it with the world, or the project has become so big you need other developers to help expand and maintain the code, BUT you still make money from installing, customizing and supporting the product. (Sun OpenOffice)
I firmly believe the problem lies in .Net as a platform. As a Delphi programmer with the option do .Net or Not, I have again and again decided to stay with Win32 and not .NET. Why? Faster and Smaller Code. I still have to see one reason to change to .Net .Net is bloted, as is all MS products. And as I see it, MS wants to control everything they touch and eventually makes money from it. Maybe a good business policy, but why must I use code from company that may start charging for .Net, etc, while there are faster alternatives availeble?
Castle
RSS Bandit
Argotic
NDoc 2.0 to rise from the ashes but I think this is too little too late.
- NUnit
- MbUnit
- Castle
- RhinoMocks
Wonderful idea! Finally someone is finally putting some money where his/her mouth is! Way to go!
@Raving Free Software Lunatic : Mono is very well funded and taken care of by Novell. Trust me (I used to work for them until about 3 days back) on this one, what they really need is some hands at writing code (good code ie)
I would love to nominate PAINT.NET, but I guess it is quite well supported already. It is by far the most useful app I have used.
I would really suggest that to sponsor more upcoming projects than the ones that are already well established, since they usually have some corporate backing if they are working with .NET
How about creating a list of ideas that you want implemented and they putting a price (prize ;)) tag on it!
I presume this is money to make the project better, right? Not a compensation or reward. If so, yes, Castle Project would definitely benefit from it.
I nominate Cuyahoga. Itâs a brilliantly simple CMS for .NET 2.0, with module and skin development made quite easy. I think they could use some more support.
my votes for stablished projects:
+1 NAnt
+1 SharpDevelop
+1 Sandcastle Help File Builder ( http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB )
for the up and coming projects :
+1 FileHelpers - http://www.filehelpers.com
+1 Mygeneration - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mygeneration
+1 XP Common Controls - http://www.codeplex.com/xpcc
+1 âAscend.Netâ Windows Forms Controls - http://www.codeplex.com/ASCENDNET
Cheers
"When has MS âthrown moneyâ at open source? Iâve cited multiple blog posts above from people who ask for exactly that, so educate us, Frans. I realize that money is not the answer to all problems, but itâs a great starting point for a larger conversation."
Well, gotdotnet, codeplex, these sites have teams behind them, custom made software was made for these sites, 3rd party maintenance teams are maintaining the hardware etc., thatâs costing money. Left alone the community efforts all over the place to support more community participation by developers out there, which leads to more free open tools.
Iâve written a lot of open source code (for example last year I released a big forum/customer support system for ASP.NET under the GPL, complete with UBB LR(n) parser system etc.) and am roaming in OSS groups for years. The main question I have when I see your post is: how will giving money to a random set of projects suddenly make people more aware that one can contribute and use open source code? I see absolutely no reason why giving away money would have that effect at all. I appreciate your effort and hats off for that, but I donât see how it can be effective.
In fact, the whole MS platform eco system isnât suitable for open source tools to become very effective. As soon as they do, MS will come with an equivalent, and whatâs worse: large droves of developers donât even know how to spell open source, left alone that theyâre even looking for open source projects, they simply look at Redmond and wait till MS comes with something.
In the Java community, things are completely the opposite. The whole eco-system around Java is simply build on top of the open source model: libraries and tools are very often free and open source. The business model of java oriented companies is build around providing services, not by selling licenses. On the MS platform this is the opposite.
Promoting open source is therefore an uphill battle, if not an impossible battle. Uphill, because the mentallity of the average mort is totally not focussed on open source in any shape or form, and impossible because MS has such a strong focus on controlling the market ontop of its own platform, theyâre totally not interested in changing the mentallity of mort at all. There are numerous examples out there, nunit and ndoc being two of the most well known. Instead of supporting nunit and mbunit, MS rolls their own unittest runner, incompatible with the open source ones, and hires the mbunit main developer. NDoc dies because the main developer has no time anymore. Instead of working WITH that code, MS releases a half-baked beta of a never-going-to-be-released toolkit called Sandcastle.
Two examples where Microsoft could have supported a beginning eco-system of open source toolkits. Instead, they effectively killed them off. Sure, both are still used, but not as wide-spread as MSâ offerings. And THAT is precisely the point.
So again, hats off for your initiative and motivation, but I have little hope (none actually) that this will help at all, simply because it wonât solve the core problem why thereâs no healthy eco system for OSS / free toolkits on .NET like there is on Java.
No nominations here, butâŚ
What about codeplex? I would consider setting up an exclusively .net sourceforge knockoff pretty supportive. And I say knockoff loveingly, I think itâs a great service with tons of extremely supportive features.
With regards to addsâŚwhat happened to the time delay? And your âdonât make them clickâ full RSS philosophy counts for nothing when you pushing ads at us over RSS.
Ok, maybe one nomination, how about WorldWind?
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
This has been great just to manifest some OSS projects I wasnât aware of, but definately want to check out. Thanks for just that!
The whole Castle project. Castle Windsor and MonoRail are the best!
Iâd vote for SubSonic also.
Iâm not sure if Rob would take the money personally (although he deserves it) but I think some of his team deserve some recompense for their hard work and effort.
I think I heard one member has been passing up paid work to allow more time to work on the project and help the community.
@Martin
Wonât Mono fundamentally be killed by Silverlight and Subsonic by Linq.
To me, there will always be a need for SubSonic, Mono, Paint.Net, etc. OSS software is very good at finding holes introduced in every MS release and filling those holes.
So that is my 2 cents. 
I think Watin and Watin Test Recorder do an amazing job for asp.net integration testing! Those projects earn my vote.
NUnit, NAnt, NDoc (please come back), ahnksvn, Castle. I donât care for blog engines b/c they are not .Net developer tools per se.