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Comment by Pathogen-David | Hacker News Reader

You can do this in the .NET ecosystem too, they accept pull requests from the community regularly. I have a few merged PRs in Roslyn, one in particular I made because I knew it didn't affect very many developers and would have trouble getting prioritized.

Also personally the ideal situation for me is for someone who is getting paid to fix the issue to go fix it without me having to get my hands dirty.

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I ran open-source teams for Microsoft for a number of years, all through GitHub. We had contribution policies, encouraged PRs, and would bend-over-backwards for external developers contributing code.

It's not an exaggeration, but I don't know how it could be better done.

.NET PRs sit unmerged for years if they're not a priority for MSFT. I'm glad it works well sometimes and that MSFT seems to care about .NET on Linux, but it's not that open.

Point out a major language that doesn't have a graveyard of PR's with similar stories.

The important distinction is that the PR graveyard of other projects isn't determined by MSFT's corporate priorities.

Of course Microsoft only include functionality they want. Just like any other platform only include what they want. It is entirely their prerogative. Just because they don't include anything and everything other people want, it does not make them less open source.

We are entirely free to fork the project, embed the change and compile our own binaries. You don't have to strongarm a change into upstream for that.

Every major open source project is in no small way driven by the interests of corporate users, from which a non-trivial number of PR's and contributions come from. This is true from Linux and Postgres to Rust and Java.

Any non-trivial OSS project has corporate sponsors on the steering committee and feature set/fixes are mostly driven by these corporate sponsors. So in the end it's all same.

That other languages may or may not be as bad as .NET does not make .NET any more or less bad.

Bonus points if you're either not asked to transfer your copyright, or asked to transfer it to a non-profit foundation.

Personally, I'm ok with doing the work myself if I didn't pay for the product. It gives me a feeling we're all working together on a better software ecosystem, because Turing knows we need it to be better sometimes.

edit: sorry for moving the goal posts, it's definitely cool that you got MR's into Roslyn, it's an awesome project.

I work on an open-source project for Microsoft, and I review and merge community PRs all the time. Nobody pays for the product I work on (or for C# or TypeScript, for that matter).

The Contributor License Agreement used on all MSFT open source projects doesn't ask you to transfer your copyright, though it does require submitters to agree to grant a permissive copyright and patent license. IANAL, but the copyright and patent clauses in Microsoft's CLA[0] do not look substantially different from the equivalent clauses in the Apache 2.0 license[1].

[0]: https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-...

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/LICENSE-APACHE...

It's a stretch to say that nobody pays for C#. A commercial Visual Studio license sure isn't free, and depending on what you're making you're at a big disadvantage without one.

Right, you're not paying for C# you're paying for an IDE. You don't need VS to use C#. Especially now with Roslyn a the c# language server a lot of other IDEs can do a lot of the same things VS can do.

And if you're working on open source/non-commercially, the free community edition is also a good option.

Indie devs and small businesses (<5 installs) can use the community edition for commercial purposes, too. I use VS Code & the C# extension most of the time, and that's free as in beer for use by anybody.

The same way that js isn't free because you need webstorm or an aws account to deploy a node app? That argument is a stretch too.

I had the same experience, submitted a PR to Roslyn, was asked to add some additional unit tests, and was merged within days.

I have a problem with that. You have essentially done work for multi-billion corporation without remuneration. That would probably violate many laws like minimum wage requirement and volunteering at for profit corporation (minimum wage must be paid). I wonder why this is not pursued.

Nearly everything that is open-source depends on people doing work for free that is used by other people who use it for profit. Maybe OP is making profit through the software they're writing using C#. Should Microsoft charge them for C# usage? Microsoft is the ones paying for development costs after all.

The purpose of open-source software is to be able to fix problems for your use case and continue using the improved software. OP could have just chosen not to upstream their changes (I'm assuming you'd be okay with that since Microsoft doesn't get their hand on the fix) but then they wouldn't be able to easily update their compiler.

I guess the only real option here is to use a community-developed language with no for-profit company behind it. Then write all the libraries that Microsoft wrote for C# and published for _free_. Hmm.

I wonder what percentage of popular languages / libraries out there have the level of reliability & support that C# and other open-source software with big corps behind them has.

But this way you are promoting inequality. Being able to commit substantial amount of time to volunteer without remuneration is a domain of privileged people, usually from wealthy white background. They can they use their contributions as highlights in their CVs and for instance get better jobs than people who were not in a position to give their time for free. Hencewhy in many countries, like mine, things like internships have to be paid. If they weren't then positions were mostly filled with youth from wealthy families.

If Microsoft was honest about equality and open source, they would have donated the whole platform to a non-profit foundation and removed its name from it.

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