"I really think we can extend the incubator idea Rob had to existing projects and also form some sort of organization to provide OSS mentoring. I'd be happy to teach the hard lessons I've learned, as well as learn from those who've run projects even more successful than mine."
So, Phil, in other words, a foundation of some sort should be founded, which receives donations and acts as a form of VC for OSS projects? (so OSS developers can get funding from that foundation to develop the projects) ?

Sounds interesting :)

"When has MS "thrown money" at open source? I've 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 it's 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., that's 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.

I've 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 don't see how it can be effective.

In fact, the whole MS platform eco system isn't suitable for open source tools to become very effective. As soon as they do, MS will come with an equivalent, and what's worse: large droves of developers don't even know how to spell open source, left alone that they're 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, they're 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 MS' 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 won't solve the core problem why there's no healthy eco system for OSS / free toolkits on .NET like there is on Java.