Reality is an illusion – .NET OSS is hard

Insightful article, but it leads right up to the author's blind spot. (It's always easier to see other people's blind spots than my own.)

He asks why not more OSS in C#? Then he makes a case for VS == C#, which he defends well enough, although there are some counter examples. He argues that the answer is that adding VS components is hard, so it's hard to add things for C#.

I think he's very close, but still missing the elephant in the room. Hackers often write things for themselves first. We tinker with out editors our environments our OS --everything.

People who love C#, generally love VS. Which means they aren't as interested in customizing their editor, or really their environment, and the tools and environment actively discourage it by becoming unstable when you monkey with it too much. Then how do you fix it?

You don't have the source.

That's the elephant in the room. OSS has difficulty spontaneously starting in the C# community because people who love C# are more likely to be OK with not having the source to their development environment, OS, applications etc. It's just not a priority.

Most people who want to tinker are likely to wander out of the MS planned city and go build their own hut out in the wilderness. We've just learned to build some very nice huts. :)