I’m a little surprised nobody has mentioned DotNetNuke. It’s a pretty big one and offers a ton of functionality. Is it that the audience here doesn’t use it? It a victim of it’s own success and people don’t think it needs financial support? I’m curious…
A project I haven’t seen mentioned so far that I use is Selenium Remote Control for .net - http://www.openqa.org/selenium-rc/
Give 10k to Castle
It’s at least 3 products : Windsor, ActiveRecord, Monorail
Another +1 for the Castle Project. I wouldn’t want to develop without it.
NHibernate first
RhinoMock second
Castle third
I see absolutely nothing wrong with putting money toward any OSS that is voted for in your post. Not because of some profound ideology that certain folks think needs to drive every decision revolving around Open Source, but because it is always nice to get a ‘atta-boy’ in the form of $$$ and certainly can’t HURT an Open Source project.
Hate to belittle all the work that’s been done, and maybe some can provide comments otherwise but…
Won’t Mono fundamentally be killed by Silverlight and Subsonic by Linq.
Obviously these projects still have a need to be supported for existing development. For new projects I don’t think I would wander into these territories again.
Comments?
Other major companies like Google, IBM, and even Sun actually not only provide financial support for the Open Source community (like Google’s Summer of Code), but hire employees whose primary job it is just to work on Open Source projects.
Newsflash: MS has been doing this for a while. Take IronPython for example, or WTL or WiX.
That is easy vote, at least for me. Castle
Lucene .NET port. Probably the best open source software library I’ve used. …
Bob Stewart on June 27, 2007 07:37 AM
I would second this suggestion as this is a well-done and FAST search engine.
It is currently in incubation under the Apache Software Foundation. Not sure how much their contribution needs are compared to some smaller groups, however.
@Frans Bouma,
For open source, that mentality isn’t that great: less people are
interested in devoting large piles of time to a project and when
it’s released, the majority of developers often won’t even think
about looking for an OSS alternative to commercial offerings.
I’m not too sure about that. There are plenty of companies out there (classic example, startups) that would go with the open (and often free) route to getting their offering off the ground. Also, OSS developers don’t develop their product with a particular business model or idea in mind, IMO.
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?
Well, for one, what Jeff’s trying to do is get a feel for what projects out there people are really interested in. If there’s genuine interest in these projects, and Jeff and I both think this is a worthwhile investment of our $$. As far as awareness goes, we’re hoping the contributors accomplishments and the usefulness of the project will raise awareness. I don’t think that’s the only criteria, because there are several OSS projects out there that are not being used heavily, but the sheer concept is so beautiful that there’s an entire ecosystem of contributors on that project. So, only time will tell.
In fact, the whole MS platform eco system isn’t suitable for open
source tools to become very effective.
I’d have to agree with you - but that’s something I’d like to change. In fact, there are teams in Redmond that are working on core components that are also realizing the value behind opening up the source in some cases - the AJAX control toolkit being a great example - http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=AtlasControlToolkit
Instead of working WITH that code, MS releases a half-baked beta of
a never-going-to-be-released toolkit called Sandcastle.
I hope you’re only exaggearating. Just to set the record straight - Sandcastle will be released.
ai
hmmm, has anyone mentioned NDoc?
+1 for Paint.net.
SubSonic indeed.
I am thinking in a different way.
I would go for " SUBSONIC ", with IronRuby support.
This would give us best of both the worlds. Ruby as well as dotNET.
Dont you think, IronRuby is one type of Open Source Project, officially paid for development to JohnLam.
Since they could licence Ruby.Net and take it further with a new name as IronRuby, then they could too support SubSonic and take it more further.
Cheers.
@ anand:
"I’m not too sure about that. There are plenty of companies out there (classic example, startups) that would go with the open (and often free) route to getting their offering off the ground. Also, OSS developers don’t develop their product with a particular business model or idea in mind, IMO."
The main problem is, what’s also described by a person earlier in the comments: devoting time to an OSS project is effectively eating away time to do commercial work. if you have to pay some bills, you better have some other sources of money, otherwise you can’t work on OSS software, at least not with a lot of time.
So what happens? In java land for example, companies pay large groups of developers money to work on tools for java which are open sourced. The companies then sell services on top of these tools/libraries/servers. So to be able to do so, they provide their own platform for their business model by providing the open source stuff they release.
In .NET land, an ISV who wants to use this model runs into a big wall, which I’ve described also here in a blogpost I made in last december:
http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2006/12/11/the-reason-why-oss-isn-t-big-in-ms-net-land-money.aspx
and which is that on average, the .NET targeting developer thinks along these lines:
- the time I put into something has to be payed
and - if I need something from a 3rd party, I look for a commercial offering, or use MS’ tools (first choice)
Maybe some OSS developers start their project just to get started. However as soon as something begins to become successful, you have to provide support, fix bugs, add new features etc. etc. 10 to 1 the vast majority here has never contributed a single line of code to any open source software project and only uses the open source products because they’re … free (as in beer). When you have to spend time on supporting your OSS project as no-one else does (and believe me, even if a lot of people use your stuff, just a tiny little fraction actually provides patches and new features), you’ll have to make a choice:
- drop it
- go full scale for it and get some money via other routes
Now, you might argue: this action from Jeff and others can help with 2), but that’s not true: there are more than just a couple of projects out there which have some followers and support can become rather intense pretty quickly.
Furthermore, make no mistake: Mono and for example NHibernate are projects owned by a big company (Mono by Novell, NHibernate by JBoss which is owned by Red Hat): you want to donate money to these big corporations? Why? Invest it in tiny projects like NDoc, and even then… it’s better to provide a better eco system where Microsoft doesn’t step on initiative from the community and simply supports OSS tools out there which are used by more than a few people (like nunit, nant etc.) instead of rolling their own copied incompatible version.
However no sign on the horizon from redmond that you will do that. On the contrary.
"I’d have to agree with you - but that’s something I’d like to change. "
I appreciate the initiative, but unless MS changes its own business model (from ISV to service provider) you’ll likely meet a lot of closed doors, simply because what MS doesn’t control is a liability: vs.net is a commercial product, relying on a 3rd party app is making things vulnerable inside itself, so MS has to roll its own.
You come with an example where MS provides the source. Great example. The thing is though: that’s NOT what should be changed. MS should work together with open source projects started by others, outside MS, and make sure these project don’t hit a wall because MS thinks they have to do their own copied version of the same project. Until that changes, there’s no OSS eco system on MS platforms simply because there’s no start with the change of mentallity with the average developer using .net dev tools: they then still will see MS’ only tools and if MS doesn’t have it, they’ll still look for commercial offerings. It’s what MS calls the ‘3rd party oppertunity’ which is still there but the particular 3rd party is in most developer’s minds a commercial ISV.
"Just to set the record straight - Sandcastle will be released."
No offence, but how long is Sandcastle still in pre-beta stage? How long till some toolkit is released which benefits every single developer out there? It’s not that the commercial offerings don’t work, it’s just that IF you want an eco system for OSS tools, you should support a community OSS offering which was already there: NDoc, not release something of your own. Because by doing that, you will effectively KILL precisely what you want to build up: why would new developers try to re-animate ndoc if MS comes with sandcastle? The answer to that question should be the direction into which MS should look. 
Jeff, i like your text based ad at the end of your blog. it is not in your face. However, i wonder how effective it is for the advertiser since it is very easy to overlook it.
MS not supporting open source surprises you ?!
Come on! Please respect your readers and loose the ads! Please.
log4net, Mono, Lucene.NET
The open source tools I would like to see on the list of receiving donations: NUnit, Rhino.Mocks and Ahnksvn. I’d really like to see that GhostDoc (http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/) also gets a piece of the cake, even though it is not open source (but still free, as in “free beer”).