.NET Open Source: What Happens When the Free Lunch Ends? | Hacker News Reader

.NET Open Source: What Happens When the Free Lunch Ends?

aaronstannard.com

27 pointsghuntley22 comments

This seems to be a mostly inflammatory blog post over a FOSS project changing the license after the fact (which they can do, as it is both their Copyright, but also ASL2 licensed).

I scanned through the comments on the blog, most of this just seems to be people being angry that they already accepted a FOSS license in good faith, as did Microsoft, and Microsoft has no current plans on switching to a fork (as there is no popular fork yet, this just happened).

People are also misreading the announcement, I think. They cannot take away ASL2 software once it is licensed as such, and they cannot make you pay for it. They can make you pay for their closed source fork of it, but they cannot make you switch to that fork.

Their announcement says that they will continue to synchronize with the open source original until late 2022, so everyone should adjust their deps to pull in the original, not the closed source fork. Everyone has until 2022 to figure out how to continue the project safely and without interference.

the blog post is not inflammatory; it's saying pretty much the same thing your comment did, which is that people are getting unnecessarily angry over the relicensing without taking a step back to think about the ecosystem and sustainability.

the whole thing is not about relicensing in the github discussion. it's about if the commerical identityserver should still be included as a default template.

> This seems to be a mostly inflammatory

This seems to be a constant theme in the .NET community - or more specifically, only seems to exist within Twitter and on the topic of OSS within .NET. At this point from what I've seen this whole thing is basically a cyclic meme.

Every couple of months, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere, a spate of angry tweets with even angier replies and retweets will be posted or someone will write a long screed of a blog post.

Many of the people involved who criticise Microsoft/.NET Foundation/OSS seem to be suffering from cognitive dissonance. One moment they will say they want OSS and demand that Microsoft contribute more to OSS. The next moment, they complain that Microsoft/.NET Foundation is "damaging" OSS by... contributing to OSS?

There doesn't seem to be any sound arguments from these critics and I just don't know what will make them happy. One thing I know for sure though that as a member of the .NET community, it is absolutely exhausting seeing yet more of this entitled drama. I really feel for the .NET team because it seems that some of their users (including some of the so called Microsoft MVP's) fuel this drama.

...not what the author of this article expects, in my opinion.

(the viability of the Microsoft developer ecosystem, despite its' attempts to clamber onto the open source bandwagon, will continue to degrade thanks to free market economics, zero-cost-of-copy, and the fact that the FOSS community eventually fills any technology gaps that appear. Many within that ecosystem will continue to deny this, and they have a few more years -- perhaps a decade -- or so where that will be a workable strategy)

Can't really see why .NET doesn't have a place in that future. You can run it in the same dockerized setups as everything else.

Good point; I wrote this a little carelessly, reacting a little bit, and should elaborate my thoughts.

The open source .NET ecosystem - and hopefully Microsoft supporting that - does have a continued place as long as it can remain relevant to the technology audience. The .NET framework has pushed plenty of boundaries in programming language research, features and functionality, for example.

What I should have focused on is the sense that I picked up from the article that free is somehow bad, and that it's justified to punish and deride people who have a (in my view, reasonable) expectation of free and open source software. It is self-evidently true that we can and do make and distribute all kinds of free and open source software at no cost.

The tendency to belittle people for expecting zero cost appears as a result, I think, of a kind of gaslighting and stockholm syndrome where people in the ecosystem have _expected_ to have to pay large amounts for software that is in many ways no better than FOSS alternatives - especially as time continues on, resulting in convergence of defect analysis, fixes, and features in popular FOSS projects.

That's a background that skews towards corporate and first-world experiences, and it's not (I don't think) aligned with the expectations of the next few generations of developers worldwide.

What .NET and other popular technologies - proprietary or otherwise - will do for those future generations is shape their ideas and visions about what technology is capable of. And I hope everyone would want that to be as optimistic as possible.

I can see your point. People will go where they can get the best deal and nobody likes having the rug pulled out from under them and suddenly having to solve licensing problems. But I can see the article’s standpoint too. Building multi-million or -billion dollar edifices on top of the free labor of FOSS maintainers is arguably exploitative and unsustainable, and the idea of being unwilling to pay a small fee for something “critical to the business” is somewhat absurd on its face.

Sure, and I hear the concern regarding exploitation of (potentially overworked, underpaid) developers and maintainers.

But if a thousand people receive a free (perhaps sugar-addled) lunch from one of a few providers -- while collectively having the resources to feed each other free lunches (more sustainably, long-term) -- it doesn't seem fair to attack and blame those people for asking difficult questions about their food source. Even if they might seem entitled today, they're asking questions that will probably appear more than fair in retrospect.

(I realize these analogies don't fit perfectly, and I'm aware I'm reframing the issue, perhaps awkwardly)

With software, fortunately, it may be business critical, but it's rarely personal-health critical the way that nutrition is (unless, perhaps, we have already incorporated infrastructure too deeply into ourselves as humans).

What makes you think so?

If a company wants to improve their margins, then eventually - in the absence of other opportunities, or in an environment that pursues efficiencies - they will reduce costs.

If a market entrant wants to get an edge on existing incumbents, they will look for opportunities to operate at lower costs.

If a non-free component can be rewritten and redistributed at a lower cost, then eventually it will be, either to improve margins or by a market entrant.

This is why I expect that the article's proposition that the marketplace should expect to pay for a component will crumble over time.

That doesn't make sense. It's never cheaper to rewrite a product from scratch yourself unless the pricing is truly messed up. People justify writing and giving away open source code in all sorts of ways but not that it's cheaper than buying.

but what is this "cost" you're talking about?

is .NET paid somehow?

could it be cheaper? maybe in terms of hardware, but overall?

In the context of the article, the costs I'm referring to are related to a third-party component (integrated easily by default in a framework) that is moving to a pay-sometimes license.

(you also make a very observant hint: total cost of ownership includes hardware-level resource provisioning)

free-as-in-beer unless you make more than $1m/yr, free-as-in-speech for everyone seems like a really good license to me. if anyone reading this thinks it's a bad idea, could you explain the drawbacks?

Other than causing a bunch of otherwise unnecessary updates for Windows users, what good was/is .NET? I've never seen the point, and it got even weirder for me when MONO came out.

[Edit] Thanks for explaining it to me. I've missed a decade of computing.

Sorry but this comment is so out of touch with reality.

.NET is huge in enterprise. There are easily billion plus distinct lines of .NET (C# or VB) code running on companies we don't even know the name of.

Now with .NET Core, .NET Foundation and the push for open sourcing, the rate of new C# lines written per day is probably increasing even more.

C# jobs are plenty. Much more than some hyped languages around here. And it shows no sign of slowing down.

By the way, C# is no longer tightly associated with Windows for a few years already. It's common for C# code written today to empower a microservices fleet deployed over a large kubernetes infrastructure.

As an example the other day I was writing low level protocol code in F# (but could do the same in C#), allocating a decent byte array on the stack (stackalloc), putting value types in it, bit-shifting and putting those numbers in place in the same byte array without a single heap allocation nor a single unsafe block of code or needing other techniques like byte array pooling. In previous days the only choice often was jumping into C/C++ and writing extern functions that usually had an associated penalty especially in hot loops where we want to employ this style of coding. Made me realize how far the .NET Core ecosystem has come in the last few years. When having to go back to Java I do see the performance penalties that I didn't see many years ago.

And yes this code is all going to be hosted in containerized Linux infrastructure. Our tests showed much better single and multi-threaded performance for our cases than many other popular frameworks across many languages we evaluated. YMMV but IMO the ecosystem has made up a lot of ground in a small space of time.

The point is not so different than the point of the JVM.

So, the idea was to support Windows on other architectures? That didn't really pan out.

The idea was to have a virtual machine based language like java was. Originally, it was not cross platform. Today it is. I know I'm not going to convince you to give a try but C# is a very neat and capable language, and the CLR is a blazingly fast runtime.

Thanks for explaining it.

Many of the things people switched to C# for were already present in Delphi. It's a shame the Borland/Embarcadero got greedy and started pricing most of us out of the market.

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