So it's maintained in the open on GitHub, it's technically open source in terms of licensing. Yet you claim it's not really open source. Care to clarify?
I never tried to pass it as anything else.
Such as? You seem to have a mental model of things that make a project objectively open source, that don't include the license. I'd be curious what those things are.
Open-source as-documentation (for lack of better term) is still useful. It makes bug fixing a whole lot easier, for one thing. But it’s not quite the same as open-source ecosystem. For that you need to have a diverse set of actors, sharing the same goal. That’s what I think successful open-source project makes. You need to accept the fact that the project is not just yours. Something like that.
Of course Microsoft could do all those things. Who knows, it they’re determined enough they might turn it around. The problem here is like I said Java is just good enough. No one really cares, except people that could use some better documentation, that have been already invested in the ecosystem. That’s why open-sourcing is still valuable, but also why they’ll never gain any adoption of the kind they’d need.
Sorry if that sounds like rambling, it’s sort of late.
As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.
> As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.
Uhm. So many free software projects work like that. A company creates something, releases it as free software. Yes, people contribute (and that's awesome by the way) but in general all of the engineering talent works at the company because they wrote it in the first place (and they hire contributors). At SUSE this is how YaST, zypper, spacewalk, et al development works (with significant contributions from the openSUSE community, but we have teams of people working on those projects so our contributions are more of a concentrated effort). There's nothing new or different about this model of free software development (Sun did the same thing with OpenSolaris and Joyent does the same thing with SmartOS). Yes, GNU and Linux follow the hobbyist model but that's not how all projects work.
My point is this is just not enough to compete with JVM, which is already a vibrant open-source ecosystem.
.net is far more of a true open source framework than android is.
It's free software, and in that sense the license is the only thing that really matters. However, if you're discussing open collaboration styles then that's a whole different discussion. Either your project is free software or it isn't. Whether it has a diverse and open development community is a separate problem, and doesn't fall under "is this project [free software]".