Open-Source and .NET – It's Not Picking Up

Microsoft spent years telling people that OSS == communism and that OSS was stealing their IP.

I imagine that the MS developers who believed the FUD have a hard time accepting that going open-source won't cause Ghost Stalin to appear and steal their children because it contradicts what MS told them for all those years. For the same reason, existing OSS developers have a hard time accepting that MS has suddenly stopped trying to undermine their legitimacy or squash them with dubious lawsuits.

Honestly, what did MS expect?

My first OSS project was SharpPcap/Packet.NET.

SharpPcap is a C# wraper for winpcap/libpcap. Packet.NET is the parser library used read/write the various protocols from/to raw binary.

I decided to become a contributor when the library saved my ass on a project. Anybody who has tried to do networking below the transport layer in Windows has probably discovered the hard way that it's not possible. Windows intentionally uses a crippled networking stack for 'security reasons' because script kiddies could use it to spoof their source address. WinPcap's driver is the magic key to unlock the rest of the stack.

Anyway, before I digress further. Developing an OSS project that targets C# sucks for the following reasons.

Git at the time was ridiculously difficult so most projects targeted SVN, which isn't great for decentralized usage.

Git support in Windows has improved dramaticaly but there will always be 'gotchas' like inconsistent line separators and issues with path separator chars. All of which requiring coaching/training contributors on how to resolve these issues before their code can be merged.

In most cases, the well known OSS 'rockstars' in the .NET ecosystem like ScottGU are employees of Microsoft or somehow deeply connected to the MSMVP ecosystem. They're were basically just Microsoft's version of the 20% time programmers who were given a longer leash to encourage other OSS devs to 'follow their lead' and produce free shit for the MS ecosystem.

If you aren't part of the MVP ecosystem, your project was basically invisible. Your best bet is to post in-depth tutorials ln CodeProject and hope somebosy takes notice enough to write about it elsewhere.

Most .NET users are just that, users. They leech, ask for help, request features, and contribute nothing. It's not clear whether it's because they won't or if it's because they can't. It's just the culture of the community.

There was always a looming spectre that what you're doing is illegal. Sure .NET is an 'open' standard because it's an ECMA standard. Except, MS has an ace in the hole otherwise known as patent protection. We're talking about one of the most aggressively adversarial monopolistic powers in the world whose CEO openly called GPL 'a cancer of the developer ecosystem'. Their answer to the OSS community came in the form of releasing a 'covenant not to sue', for now...

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Most of these issues have gotten better over time.

There's still way too much hero worship of MS MVPs but that won't change as long as MS is making a killing from their certification mill and free grassroots marketing.

Microsoft still practices 'embrace and extinguish' they just do it in the OSS ecosystem now. Just look at how they've treated the MonoDevelop project. Miguel de Icaza should be given a frickin medal for bringing .NET to the nix ecosystem back when MS was still making threats of litigation over the project's 'illegal' nature.

Instead, more than a decade after Mono first began .NET support in nix is acknowledged. Microsoft finally releases a nix compatible version of Visual Studio; announcing the event with great fanfare to the MS certified developer ecosystem as if they were the first to come up with the idea. Meanwhile Mono gets brushed under the carpet as some unfortunate past mishap.

The biggest problem with developing OSS in windows is...

The CLI suuucks. I wholeheartedly mean it when I say that it should have been taken out back and shot a long time ago.

MS had a great opportunity to fix it but instead they released Powershell. Yet another MS-specific 'snowflake' language dressed up as a developer tool.

Attempts have been made to provide a first-class package management tool but -- from what I've read -- they're poor wuality and cause more problems than they solve. NuGet boasts 50k packages but I'm willing to bet the vast majority of those are front-end JS libs, not actual .NET libs.

I don't do much OSS development in Windows these days but when I do, I usually start in nix first and adapt the code to Windows last.

Writing OSS in Windows feels too much like being an unpaid, underappreciated, intern for MS.

As one of the first SharePoint MSMVPs (there were two of us for SharePoint Team Services) I watched what was once a meaningful "place at the table" - where MVPs could evangelize for the users in the communities they served - devolve to a place at the bar. As in, a literal bar, because to stay an MVP it sure seemed like you had a lot of parties to go to so you could make the right person laugh at the right time.

I ran the largest online community for SharePoint users at the time, and was awarded because of that. I think 7 years total? Maybe 8? I spoke at an internal sales conference (TechReady, where it was suggested I cover up the glowing apple logo on my laptop, and I made anti-FrontPage jokes - that were, incidentally, approved by PMs in the FrontPage team!), and was asked for input on several features. Later, my community outreach was deemed less important, because I wasn't contributing to the official newsgroups. The input MVPs gave came too late in the cycle to have any effect. I wasn't the type to enjoy pub crawls, so the networking that became a de facto requirement to continued participation was out of my reach. The program grew to include people whose only motivation to join the ranks of MSMVPs was to get early access to software and to curry favor with some PMs or RDs. Several of us started to see it becoming a "good ol' boys club", and we knew our days were numbered.

Another former MSMVP (who also didn't play the reindeer games, as we called it) is now my business partner. We both occasionally miss the camaraderie of the summits, the opportunity to (we naively thought) influence the direction of SharePoint, and the relevance that the little blue and silver badge had. MSMVPs (at least in our product) were once seen as leaders and ombudsmen simultaneously, and now they're seen primarily as a way to score free drinks at a conference. We miss the olden days, and wish for the program to mean what it was supposed to mean.

I never really wrote all that out before, never really came to terms with the loss I experienced when I found out that I wasn't renewed. It didn't diminish my evangelism for SharePoint (we still train and consult), but part of me wonders if my pragmatism, my willingness to be brutally honest when SharePoint didn't make sense, and my quiet protest at being asked to focus on MS-official communities contributed to that. Not wonder, actually. That's not the right word. I'm pretty sure all those things contributed to it.

I guess I wonder if there was anything I could've done to effect change in the MSMVP program, to make it something where our opinions actually mattered. I'm not bitter about it. I was, but I got over that in a hurry. Now, I'm just sad. It could've been so much more.

Edit: meant to be a reply to Evan's comment, sorry about that.