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Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

Maui is Open Source, MIT License

.NET is Open Source

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source

I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.

Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.

My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.

I hope I am not wrong.

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It isn't about whether it is open source or not. It's about what will be their stance on GUIs in a year or two and whether the projects of today are abandonded or not. Windows Forms, Silverlight, WPF, UWP, WinUI, Blazor, and then Xamarin Forms and MAUI, and then the third party ones like Avalonia and Uno Platform.

It's insane because actually all anyone wants is Windows Forms and WPF. If Microsoft made a cross-platform version of Windows Forms and WPF, they would be the cross-platform frameworks, at least for desktop.

If you want cross-platform WPF, there is Avalonia. For many normal-ish applications you basically change a few namespaces and that should be bulk of the work to migrate.

I do wonder sometimes whether MS should just pick it up as a default-endorsed desktop UI toolkit for .NET, but I guess rivalries, internal turf wars and other priorities make that difficult.

I love the fact that .NET and friends are open source, but my issue isn't with the licensing, it's with m$ funneling tons of resources on projects that (most likely) will end up being a dead end.

I'd also love if maui actually takes off since it does seem pretty neat, but until microsoft uses it for teams or any other of their clients, I'll pass.

They also aren't even targeting linux or web browsers, which doesn't really make this more compelling than Flutter.

Tons of ressources ? MAUI is clearly underfunded!

.NET is used all over the place in Microsoft, including many Microsoft Teams services being migrated to .NET. Teams is listed on Microsoft’s .NET customers page.

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/customers

Teams was originally written before this particular release existed.

The commenter was referring to Microsoft's GUI frameworks on offer in .NET and not .NET in general. Of course .NET is used everywhere at Microsoft. C# is one of the most popular languages in the world.

They were talking about Microsoft constantly re-inventing GUI frameworks and then abandoning them. For example, you bring up Teams, but Teams is actually an Electron app, which gets to the point of the commenter.

Putting it up on Github won't change the likely outcome that the project will be abandondend for the next shiny thing in 2 or 3 years.

I think they may be referring to WPF, it promised so much, and it was great - then it was just left to die, and Microsoft moved on to MAUI

Actually they moved onto UWP, then they moved onto WinUI 3. Now all this talk about MAUI but they have done zero dogfooding of it. People are sceptical of WinUI 3 but at least they used it in Windows 11.

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