.NET open source is 'heavily under-funded' says AWS | Hacker News Reader

.NET open source is 'heavily under-funded' says AWS

theregister.com

This is a crap article, to put it nicely. The article barely even talks about funding, and only mentions it in the context of the .NET Foundation, which is not all of .NET's massive open-source community. .NET has a thriving OSS scene and, frankly, NuGet packages are often of far better quality than anything you'll find on NPM. .NET receives regular releases and security patches.

The article spends far, far too much time talking about .NET Framework, which is not the same as .NET (formerly .NET Core). The entire point of .NET Core was to be cross-platform; this means things that are Windows only (COM, WCF, WPF, etc.) were and are deprioritized. This surprises no one.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say the whole article is a submarine marketing piece for AWS.

AWS Team: "we've spent a lot of time getting customers from .NET Framework to .NET Core, so customers can get away from Windows and SQL Server licenses"

Nothing stopping you from using postgres or something else with .NET on Windows. I have for years. The EFCore providers are all there.

Yep. I have used Mysql with .NET and Entity Framework.

Microsoft has built a first class, very performant ecosystem with .NET Core that happily plows through millions of queries on Debian and Postgres with minimal resources (512MB RAM and a slow CPU). Meanwhile, Microsoft has done an admirable job with continued support for .NET Framework.

Why would Microsoft invest in making .NET Framework work on non-Windows systems when it has multiple other architecture decisions that limit performance and bind it to Windows that were fixed in .NET Core? Especially when Windows lock-in is a feature to Microsoft, not a bug.

Amazon expecting a free handout of multi-platform support from Microsoft to allow them to lift and shift applications written prior to 2016 on .NET Framework to a new OS and software stack is audaciously unprofessional and embarrassing.

Microsoft is already supporting these legacy applications with security and performance updates for developers who haven't modernized them to .NET Core. If you want all the new features you've had notice for 7 years that you need to migrate, with Microsoft emphasizing this with the .NET 5 release in 2020 (which is .NET Core officially superseding .NET Framework).

From one lock-in to another one?

Sounds like Amazon is encountering legacy .NET Framework code that should have been upgraded to .NET 5, but Amazon's clients have spent the last few years not investing in their software and want to blame Microsoft for their own disinvestment in their software stack.

Microsoft is willing to bend over backwards and support legacy .NET Framework, but expecting them to invest in making Amazon's lift and shift of legacy applications easy and convenient is insane. There is no reason for Microsoft or anyone else to make Amazon's job easier.

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