programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
As part of my new advertising initiative, Microsoft and I are teaming up to donate $10,000 in support of open source .NET projects.
Why am I focusing on .NET open source projects? In short, because open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem. Many highly popular open source projects have contributed so much to the .NET community, and they've gotten virtually no support at all from Microsoft in return. I'd like to see that change. In fact, I'll go even further-- I think it must change if Microsoft wants to survive as a vendor of development tools.
Of course, I'm not the first person to make this observation:
It's a shame that Microsoft can't put together an organization like INETA (who already gives small stipends to folks to speak at User Groups) and gave away grants/stipends to the 20 or so .NET Open Source Projects that TRULY make a difference in measurable ways. The whole thing could be managed out of the existing INETA organization and wouldn't cost more than a few hundred grand - the price of maybe 3-4 Microsoft Engineers.
The open source community in .NET is big, but it is only a fraction of the size of the open source community in other environments (Java, for instance). This disparity can be explained by looking at the basic facts of the .NET community: there's one central vendor, Microsoft. This puts Microsoft in a position where they have the ear of every .NET developer, team lead and architect. And Microsoft isn't doing anything to foster a healthy OSS community around .NET.
In my company's commercial application we depend upon DotNetNuke, Nant, log4net, NUnit and other open source tools. Those open source projects help support us. In fact, without DNN, we would probably be out of business because our developments costs would be too high. In turn, my company helps support Microsoft through the purchase of licenses and MSDN subscriptions. Yet Microsoft does not complete the circle by financially supporting any of those open source projects.
I believe it is in Microsoft's best interests to identify a handful of open source projects to support, especially where those projects fill a void in the Microsoft product line, or where the project promotes the adoption of Microsoft products. However, I think the project bears even more responsibility to identify how they can benefit a potential corporate sponsor, and then actively pitch the idea to the corporation whose sponsorship is being sought. The project should care more about developing and growing this relationship than the corporate sponsor, since the project could well die without the support, while the corporation only loses one of many potential opportunities.
Here are my initial thoughts on splitting up the $10,000:
I'd also like to see this become a yearly event. As long as my advertising revenues hold up, I'm certainly willing to contribute a percentage back to the community every year.
All of this will be determined by popular vote, of course. Let's start by getting together a list of candidates. I'm soliciting nominations. Which .NET open source projects do you find most useful?
It's gotten be SubSonic. I use it everyday and it makes DAL a breeze.
Geri Langlois on June 28, 2007 9:02 AMSubsonic. Supersonic DAL :)
Maciej on June 28, 2007 9:07 AMSubsonic.
Maciej on June 28, 2007 9:08 AMI nominate TagLib-Sharp (www.taglib-sharp.com) which is written entirely in .NET 2.0 and continues to improve on a daily basis. From what I've seen, it's being maintained by one individual (with random help from others) who is currently attending college (definitely the type of person that could use the donations).
John Rennemeyer on June 28, 2007 9:34 AMa) Argotic Syndication Framework
b) Sandcastle Help File Builder
c) BlogEngine.NET
d) Paint.NET
I nominate PietschSoft.VE (http://codeplex.com/pietschsoftve3), an open source ASP.NET Virtual Earth mapping server control. I know it can't compete with the likes of MbUnit or DasBlog, but one can hope.
Chris Pietschmann on June 28, 2007 9:55 AMI use (and vote for) Subsonic.
Alan Hunter on June 28, 2007 10:01 AMTeam MediaPortal are really started to get going, a cash injection would kick things along Very nicely.
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/
It's a .net (c#) open source HTPC application (like Microsoft's MCE) with some great developers on board and heaps of potential.
Get's my biased vote.
The ones that I wish I could use most in my current job are NHibernate and Castle. When I've used them before, they've really made a big difference.
I vote for CruiseControl.NET, if that's eligible.
And, nice idea :)
Dino on June 28, 2007 10:50 AMI think this is all interesting.
$2500
I don't want to say this - but do you think if they wanted to make money they could just sell their software?
ie. I don't see ReSharper going open source, and it's popular.
Perhaps a better way of funding these companies if for them to charge a small fee.
As far as Microsoft 'helping' them, there are better ways. Free MSDN license for a year, free VS.net, free Vista license.
But, the best way would probably be for them to openly support these projects and stop trying to assimulate all of them :)
ie. let's dump MSUnit and use NUnit. Let's support Monorail as an alternative to webforms. Both are good, but if MS openly would support them, it would help them more than a one time $2500 handout...
Steve on June 28, 2007 11:20 AMIf nothing else, this post is a great list of Open Source .NET projects.
Scott on June 28, 2007 11:30 AMSubsonic and the CSK!
Scott on June 28, 2007 12:19 PM"but do you think if they wanted to make money they could just sell their software?"
I think you are missing the point. The money is not paying for software, oss has many contributors and this is about recognising good projects and good ideas.
"As far as Microsoft 'helping' them, there are better ways. "
Again missing the point. This is all about diversity. MS already helps developers a lot.
fred on June 28, 2007 12:22 PMHere's a vote for an up and coming open source project :
NGenerics (http://www.codeplex.com/NGenerics).
For established projects :
- CC.NET
- NUnit
- NAnt
- TypeMock
- Paint.NET
I definitly vote for SubSonic. Best DAL ever!
Very innovative thinking, Jeff. Good work. I wish you a lot of success and I'll be following the progress.
Dave
DotNetNuke
10K = another developer to help debug
Cire on June 28, 2007 1:42 PMMy vote goes to NHibernate. Hibernate is useful, but I don't think I could live well without NHibernate.
Mike
Michael on June 28, 2007 1:52 PMI first nominate screwturn wiki. http://www.screwturn.eu .
It's really simple and stands under the GPL.
My second vote goes for SubSonic which is a really awesome project.
I found many people nominating NUnit or MBUnit but no one talked about NCover which is a very valuable piece of software ( http://ncover.org/site/ ). The only thing is I don't know if it's still opensource because I can't find where to get the source code, the website doesn't say anything about it (or I didn't find it).
Etienne PIERRE on June 29, 2007 2:32 AMHere's a list of some of the most popular open source projects in C#
http://www.koders.com/csharpreport.aspx
Haacked on June 29, 2007 2:39 AMThe Castle Project and NHibernate.
Pierre Henri Kuat on June 29, 2007 2:40 AMI should qualify my last comment. I meant to say, "Most Popular according to Koders.com search frequency." However, not every project is in the index.
Haacked on June 29, 2007 2:40 AMPlus one for System.Data.SQLite, the ADO.NET 2.0 provider for SQLite.
http://sqlite.phxsoftware.com/
Quite important as SQLite is being used everywhere these days.
JSD on June 29, 2007 3:36 AMWe can probably safely leave it to the advertisers or their representatives to spend money where they think it will be effective, ad blocking or not. The idea of a disinterested third party handling placement is excellent.
If the FePy project (Microsoft's IronPython on Mono with many of the Python standard libraries) is looking for contributions you might feel that helping them would be assisting "the Microsoft Ecosystem".
Good luck with the transition to advertising! I'm a feeble AdSense user myself, for now ...
Steve Holden on June 29, 2007 5:19 AMWhile Reflector is great, it's not open source.
Yeah, until you use Reflector on it. ;)
-B
"In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion." -Unknown
Ok, one more for SubSonic, NUnit, AnhkSVN, TortoiseSVN.
I'm on the fence about MS supporting SharpDevelop. It's a direct competitor, with some differences in tools, to VS. MS give money to them? Not so much...
@Frans: Think about where RedHat would be if they didn't throw money at Linux. IBM even has done it. Why can't Microsoft do it too? It only makes sense if you want to increase exposure of a technology, then support it. These people who create and work on these projects have mouths to feed, possibly more than their own. (Don't start on the "get a job" stuff, most of these guys do have jobs. Consider cost of living these days.)
It kind of also equates to the music industry. The record companies should top taking from the musicians if you aren't going to pay them.
Now push the musician aside and insert a programmer. Next, shove the music aside and insert an open source project. Now, swap the recording industry with a major corporation, Microsoft included but not exclusive. What kind of picture do you see? Players and substance are different, but the problem remains.
Big players are using small players so they can get what they want for free. Why not return some of that back to the smaller players?
Where do some of these projects get webspace and advertising from? The cost of that alone would kill a project quickly. Sure, there are cheap hosting services, but as features are added on the cost goes up. I wouldn't want to continually dole out money from my pocket alone to pay for these things. And spending the time out pushing the project instead of coding it, or figuring out how to come up with a decent marketing plan to possible provide such things a paid services and maybe full time support. This means that a team is developing. I can't see a team of people providing all these services AND creating the product for free even though the product is free! Licensing of the product is one thing, providing services along with it is a totally different subject but deeply rooted in this issue.
One way to look at this whole thing is not so much just giving money to the project, but "granting" the money to support smaller business that may end up supporting the bigger business. There definitely is a huge ROI in investing in the right projects.
John Baughman on June 29, 2007 6:04 AM@Etienne PIERRE:
Sadly, it seems NCover is indeed no longer open source:
http://ncover.org/SITE/forums/thread/1111.aspx
Too bad!
Jeroen
Jeroen on June 29, 2007 7:45 AMHmmm... Open Source... Here goes...
Infralution Licensing System (http://www.infralution.com/)
It's not free, but you get the source. Hence, it's open source.
It's a great component and well worth the small amount it costs.
NetSyndicate
Again, not free, but it's about the only thing out there in .NET that I've seen that allows podcasting easily in DotNetNuke.
DotNetNuke... Just a no brainer there.
While I like Paint.NET, it's not a replacement for Photoshop... Certainly worth consideration though... Not a nomination, but perhaps a small cheer for it...
I'm not too keen on nominating developer tools (yes - I'm all for ILS - but it's just so good). While there are some very good ones available, for .NET OS to have some kind of meaning outside of the .NET community, it needs to have some broader appeal. Things like DNN and Paint.NET are perfect examples.
Cheers
Ryan Smyth on June 29, 2007 9:39 AMThis is an incredibly valuable discussion - not just from the excellent list of .NET OSS projects but also for the varied viewpoints (concerns about Microsoft's OSS stance, value of x-plat .NET in Mono).
My team is sponsoring OSCON this year - if anyone is interested in getting together for an informal "birds of a feather" discussion there to flesh out what a full-featured Open Source Community program from Microsoft should look like, let me know (send email to sramji@microsoft.com) and we'll organize one.
And to all of you who put your blood, sweat, and code into Open Source projects on Microsoft technologies - thank you on behalf of my team and the whole company.
Sam Ramji
Director, Open Source Software Lab
Microsoft Corporation
My vote goes to SubSonic, great tool
ReTox on June 29, 2007 10:35 AMThe one's we use on an everyday basis and without which work would be harder :
1. MbUnit NUnit
1. CruiseControl.Net
3. Log4Net
4. SubSonic
I vote for ScrewTurnWiki (http://www.screwturn.eu)
Wobin on June 30, 2007 6:51 AMIn no order, If I can only have one, just select one at random.
SharpDevelop
CSK
DotNetNuke
Since everyone is mentioning SharpDvelop, i'm pointing here to a Flash/Actionscript IDE, FlashDevelop:
http://www.flashdevelop.com
Is there an official place to cast votes? If it was mentioned in the extremely long list of comments above, I scrolled right by it.
As for my vote, I would like to continue stuffing the ballot box for SUBSONIC: ALL YOUR DATEBASE ARE BELONG TO US.
flipdoubt on June 30, 2007 7:30 AMI forgot about Cuyahoga, http://www.cuyahoga-project.org/
chrixian on June 30, 2007 9:41 AMHello ...
I'm developing a open source CMS call Olimpo - Content Manager System that is for the Portuguese community.
Right now I'm just ending first fase of developing, that is the the core of Olimpo and I will start second fase that is more modules that can be used by my clients.
This is a highly customized CMS that can be use by any one.
The final goal is to have a service based on Olimpo that anyone can create his own website / blog / Store / portal over internet using a easy administration and could upload some home made modules to interact with the CMS.
Right now I don't have source code to download because I'm changing the my Head Set to Linux. Olimpo is compiled over Mono, but I was developing in Windows (Windows .NET 2.0 Framework).
There is a SourceForge project that I will feed as long that I put the linux compiling Olimpo: https://sourceforge.net/projects/olimpocm
I don't know what I have to do to participate in this. My email is: esqueleto@tusofona.com and it's my MSN too.
I know that I don't have a great project in hands, but it's my goal to use this in Portuguese open source community.
Hope you can help me.
Regards
Paulo Aboim Pinto
Odivelas - Portugal
Screwturn wiki
chrixian on June 30, 2007 1:50 PMFirst of all the amazing CastleProject
and after: Cuyahoga, SVN, Log4net, NUnit
Paolo Corti on July 1, 2007 2:29 AMAnother vote for Umbraco, www.umbraco.org
Really really nice CMS, with good integration for asp.net custom controls, excellent support for XHTML, etc...
Ruatara P on July 1, 2007 10:26 AMMy favourite is:
Zedgraph: http://www.zedgraph.org
Other projects I like are:
Report Manager: http://reportman.sourceforge.net/
PDFSharp: http://www.pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp/
Another vote for Castle Project.
And I second with Mono.
I'll be putting the vote page up Monday. Thanks again for all the excellent suggestions in the comments!
Jeff Atwood on July 2, 2007 3:35 AMIs it to late?
My votes:
umbraco
subsonic
NUnit
+ one vote to wonderful Castle Project
Bruno on July 2, 2007 8:03 AMHere's mine :
- NUnit
- Cruise Control .NET
- Subsonic
- NGenerics
- NCover
My vote goes for the castle project (monorail). I would definately like to see that project develop even further.
Subsonic is also a very time-saving useful project.
I think we have all used ICSharpCode SharpZipLib in our projects at some point.
So where can we go to vote now?
Justin Chase on July 3, 2007 8:38 AMSubsonic is great and has a strong support backbone from what I can tell so far.
I would like to see or if I had time to start an open source version of phpBB. I did what I think was a decent search for one and only found one justanotherforum and the now pay to play version from community server.
Brian Boatright on July 3, 2007 9:57 AMHave I somehow missed the voting page?
Peter on July 3, 2007 11:25 AMThere is some kind of system for this: the MVP program.
They work hard to find the right people, but if they miss somebody who deserves it, try this: go to http://www.microsoft.com/mvp, click "Frequently Asked Questions" at the bottom and the last question is "Q13: How do I contact the MVP program team?"
Use that email address to submit a suggestion!
Subsonic!!!
Robin on July 4, 2007 5:14 AMNomination: Anthem.NET
Andy Miller on July 4, 2007 10:42 AMMy votes:
- Mono Project (www.mono-project.com)
- ActiveLock (www.activelocksoftware.com)
I vote for mojoPortal, http://www.mojoportal.com, a C#-based open source CMS.
Josh on July 4, 2007 11:32 AMProbably too late to nominate, but BugTracker.Net has been solid for my group.
Brendan on July 5, 2007 5:19 AMAnother vote for Ankhsvn. .NET users need a choice for source control integration and must stop blindly accepting SourceUnSafe.
Dan on July 5, 2007 5:46 AMAdd another vote for screwturn wiki
Nate on July 5, 2007 12:15 PMWhat's going on with this? The vote page was to be up last Monday, but I'm not seeing any mention of it anywhere . . .
Chris on July 6, 2007 1:27 PMIt's a lot more work than I thought it would be. For one thing, who checks to make sure these projects are actually open source? NDoc wasn't, despite what people thought..
Soon!
Jeff Atwood on July 6, 2007 1:43 PMI vote for VMukti http://www.vmukti.com, A .Net3.0 based opensource unified communication product.
Among the top 10 Most Active projects on sourceforge Coddeplex.
The Best OpenSource collaborative communication Videoconferencing solution
Nominated as a finalist for the Community Choice Awards 2007 on Source Forge
Siji on July 7, 2007 4:09 AMmy vote goes to http://www.commercestarterkit.org/ ecommerce portal
jaydev on July 8, 2007 1:40 PMI am voting for NGenerics. This library is really becoming a most popular class library for .Net.
hg on July 9, 2007 2:33 AMMy votes for MbUnit and NHibernate
Darren on July 9, 2007 5:15 AMCSK all the way
Skip Carter on July 9, 2007 9:18 AMI Nominat ScrewTurn Wiki
it fantastic!!
Kingy on July 10, 2007 4:09 AMI would like to nominate my own open-source project - .communities
You can find out more information about the project here:
http://www.codeplex.com/DotCommunities
The more .Net becomes cross platform, the more opportunities exist for .Net coders. The best chance to make this happen goes to mono.
Too bad mono has become a part of Novell and didn't they make a deal with Microsoft?
Anyway here's my vote
Mono
Now, if somebody could migrate put a cool grid enabled rdbms on mono...
chicagokahuna on July 10, 2007 8:28 AMMy vote:
- SubSonic
- The Commerce Starter Kit (CSK)
These are the tools that I am using:
+1 ZedGraph
+1 NLog
+1 NUnit
+1 Alchemi Grid Computing Framework (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/alchemi/)
+1 dnAnalytics
+1 Math.NET (http://www.cdrnet.net/projects/nmath/)
+1 NCover
+1 TestDriven.NET
+1 Netron (http://www.orbifold.net/Netron/info.php)
+1 MSBuild Community Tasks
+1 Snippet Compiler
+1 Regulazy
+1 WiX
I know some of those aren't open-source...Whoops.
That's all I can think of for now, more later, maybe.
+1 NUnit
+1 PowerShell Community Extensions (http://www.codeplex.com/powershellcx)
ScrewTurn Wiki
Castle Project
Another vote for CSK....
Jens on July 12, 2007 10:43 AMCoolStorage.NET : http://www.codeplex.com/coolstorage
A .NET 2.0 ORM library which has received quite a bit of attention since it was published on CodePlex a month ago.
Philippe on July 12, 2007 12:02 PMI'd like to vote for the Screwturn Wiki... with a bit of extra development work it will be the best wiki out there i think
James Wallker on July 12, 2007 1:03 PMScrewturn wiki
http://www.screwturn.eu
The screwturn wiki engine (http://www.screwturn.eu). Very nice .NET Wiki implementation.
nevillev on July 13, 2007 12:48 PMI vote for SubSonic(www.subsonicproject.com). Its a great tool for data access layer.
Zharfan Mazli on July 21, 2007 10:38 AMI nominate ScrewTurn Wiki. It's a great Wiki tool based on .NET!
http://www.screwturn.eu
ORANGE! Its like a warm hug and a "welcome home!" every time I post.
Anyhow, I'd like to nominate www.screwturn.eu 's ASP.NET wiki software. It is about the easiest and best .NET implementation of a wiki that I've found.
I've been using it for about a week, and its been nothing but a pleasure. Its pretty well configurable, and because its OSS, I'm able to easily change stuff (like page layouts and scripts) that wouldn't be doable in a closed source app.
mcgurk on August 1, 2007 12:36 PMYou left out:
hMailServer (not .NET but open source windows)
Any other mail servers?
tb on August 2, 2007 12:41 PMMono - important for .NET projects to be accepted outside of Windows
ScrewTurn Wiki - well-built, easy to use, and easy to extend
SharpDevelop
Paint.NET
I'd also like to add support for ScrewTurn wiki. It's light, it's fast and the code is well structured and maintained (not by lazy little me however!).
Although a fledgling project, I have found that many others like myself are flocking away from other wikis in favour of this gem.
My vote would go for ScrewTurn wiki. The look and feel are great and I constantly find non-technical colleagues approaching me to find out how to use it, which I think is great praise for any product, especially a software product. Anything that people can see, look at it, find useful and then want to use is very well designed, be it software or a hardware widget.
Ryan Walker on August 16, 2007 5:06 AMScrewTurn wiki :)
Shaun on August 23, 2007 3:28 AMBigJumblies get my vote
Cire on August 23, 2007 10:58 AMnot in list yet:
pavel samokha on August 26, 2007 5:11 AMScrewTurnWiki Very fast, it is the best I have seen.
Hemant on August 27, 2007 11:26 AMI nominate ScrewTurn wiki.
i8pika on September 8, 2007 2:35 AMI will also nominate ScrewTurn Wiki. I've been using it for over two months and it's working great at my company.
Luis Alonso Ramos on September 29, 2007 7:38 AMMy vote goes to BlogEngine.NET
Mads Kristensen on October 5, 2007 5:43 AMIt’s very good thing that lots of initiatives are taking place in the area of open source .net projects. I am .net developer and found lot of great things that I can use for development from open source projects. Recently I came across a list of some projects at http://www.dotnetopen.net/
I'd like to vote for the Screwturn Wiki... with a bit of extra development work it will be the best wiki out there i think
http://sostroy.ru/
My vote goes to AForge.Net. A great free open source imaging library for .Net.
Besides, if you are interested in learning how to exploit multicore processors to speed up image processing using AForge.Net, you will find a great example using AForge.Net and multithreading to improve the performance in working with images and with multicore CPUs, in the book C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginners Guide, by Gaston Hillar, Packt Publishing - www.packtpub.com
It includes many exercises related to image management with multicore support. Highly recommended if you want to improve performance and UI responsiveness.
You can download the code from Packt's website. http://www.packtpub.com/beginners-guide-for-C-sharp-2008-and-2005-threaded-programming/book
There is also an article in Packt's website: http://www.packtpub.com/article/simplifying-parallelism-complexity-c-sharp
I bought the book last week and it helped me a lot in my image processing needs. Now, I can split an image in many parts using the code from the book and I can make it exploit my Core 2 Quad. My boss is impressed!
Diego Salinas on February 4, 2009 6:10 AMMy vote would go for ScrewTurn wiki. The look and feel are great and I constantly find non-technical colleagues approaching me to find out how to use it, which I think is great praise for any product, especially a software product. Anything that people can see, look at it, find useful and then want to use is very well designed, be it software or a hardware widget.
http://olimpiclands.ru
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