Microsoft's .NET Foundation Under Fire As Resigning Board Member Questions Its Role (theregister.com)
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The role of Microsoft's .NET Foundation, set up for the governance and support of open-source .NET and related projects, has been questioned by a former board member who resigned in frustration. Here's an excerpt from The Register's report: Rodney Littles II is a software engineer at Megsoft Consulting and core maintainer of an open-source project, ReactiveUI, which is a .NET Foundation project. The .NET Foundation was formed in 2014 and describes itself as "an independent, non-profit organization established to support an innovative, commercially friendly, open-source ecosystem around the .NET platform." Littles joined the .NET Foundation board in August 2020. In his campaign pitch he spoke of a "serious disconnect in the .NET ecosystem" in that Microsoft promotes .NET open source but that the community around it is not healthy. "Maintainers of .NET OSS that Microsoft wants to help thrive are still in rough shape," he said. The sustainability of open-source projects was a key concern, as was expanding the .NET open-source ecosystem.
Littles resigned from the .NET Foundation board ahead of its elections in September. He intended to say nothing in public about it, but changed his mind when the foundation posted that "we wish him all the best as he refocuses on his personal life." Concerned friends contacted him, resulting in this post, where he explains some of the background to his resignation and said: "I am fine. No issue in my personal life took me away from the board." According to Littles' post, "the .NET Foundation was not concerned about its membership" and "hasn't been transparent with the community about anything." He asked the foundation: "Are you here to enforce Microsoft's will on .NET Open Source, or are you here to help foster and promote a healthy community?" He added: "The scoreboard doesn't look good for the latter... I watched Microsoft kill an Open Source Project, while my friends in the community demanded the Foundation say something, I felt powerless to do anything. It was clear the reasons I joined the Foundation weren't important."
We asked Littles about his experience of being on the board. He joined, he told us, with the awareness that the previous board "was not a fully functioning board... it didn't seem coherent, it didn't seem that it was a board moving towards a goal. They put up the maturity model which I had a very big issue with." Project Maturity was a pilot including "maturity profiles," designed to improve software quality. The project was abandoned shortly after its introduction after community members complained that it was over-reaching, with board member Ben Adams acknowledging that "we didn't then open this discussion up to all projects, to find out if it was acceptable to them, or if there was a better way. This was wrong." Littles told us: "My problem with the maturity model was it seemed too Microsoft bureaucratic... member projects would have to provide a service level agreement for consumers of those libraries... it was elitist and exclusionary. I felt the model should have been more about how do we open up a path for a small open-source library to go from a one-person labour of love to a library that the community can depend on? I felt the focus was more on overseeing and dictating versus nurturing and helping."
Microsoft engaged in some strange behavior with regard to its WinGet project, finding out all the details of an existing open-source project called AppGet by dangling the prospect of a job at Microsoft for its creator, but then in effect killing that open-source project though borrowing many of its ideas. Littles was more than disappointed. "The foundation, which is supposed to be the champion for open source, said nothing," Littles told us. "The foundation remained silent and to me, that was extremely loud... that is what made me wake up and realize the foundation doesn't care about the community or incidents like this... the community was in outrage behind this and the Foundation that's supposed to be Microsoft's open source arm said nothing." AppGet was not a .NET Foundation project, but Little felt that "if you're here for open source, you cannot be exclusionary, you cannot say it's not a foundation project so we don't care."
Littles resigned from the .NET Foundation board ahead of its elections in September. He intended to say nothing in public about it, but changed his mind when the foundation posted that "we wish him all the best as he refocuses on his personal life." Concerned friends contacted him, resulting in this post, where he explains some of the background to his resignation and said: "I am fine. No issue in my personal life took me away from the board." According to Littles' post, "the .NET Foundation was not concerned about its membership" and "hasn't been transparent with the community about anything." He asked the foundation: "Are you here to enforce Microsoft's will on .NET Open Source, or are you here to help foster and promote a healthy community?" He added: "The scoreboard doesn't look good for the latter... I watched Microsoft kill an Open Source Project, while my friends in the community demanded the Foundation say something, I felt powerless to do anything. It was clear the reasons I joined the Foundation weren't important."
We asked Littles about his experience of being on the board. He joined, he told us, with the awareness that the previous board "was not a fully functioning board... it didn't seem coherent, it didn't seem that it was a board moving towards a goal. They put up the maturity model which I had a very big issue with." Project Maturity was a pilot including "maturity profiles," designed to improve software quality. The project was abandoned shortly after its introduction after community members complained that it was over-reaching, with board member Ben Adams acknowledging that "we didn't then open this discussion up to all projects, to find out if it was acceptable to them, or if there was a better way. This was wrong." Littles told us: "My problem with the maturity model was it seemed too Microsoft bureaucratic... member projects would have to provide a service level agreement for consumers of those libraries... it was elitist and exclusionary. I felt the model should have been more about how do we open up a path for a small open-source library to go from a one-person labour of love to a library that the community can depend on? I felt the focus was more on overseeing and dictating versus nurturing and helping."
Microsoft engaged in some strange behavior with regard to its WinGet project, finding out all the details of an existing open-source project called AppGet by dangling the prospect of a job at Microsoft for its creator, but then in effect killing that open-source project though borrowing many of its ideas. Littles was more than disappointed. "The foundation, which is supposed to be the champion for open source, said nothing," Littles told us. "The foundation remained silent and to me, that was extremely loud... that is what made me wake up and realize the foundation doesn't care about the community or incidents like this... the community was in outrage behind this and the Foundation that's supposed to be Microsoft's open source arm said nothing." AppGet was not a .NET Foundation project, but Little felt that "if you're here for open source, you cannot be exclusionary, you cannot say it's not a foundation project so we don't care."
Microsoft vs open source (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds to me like he expected Microsoft open source to be more like open source and less like Microsoft.
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Well, if it says "open source" on the tin, you get to expect open source in the tin.
Not Leatherface's barf-santorum blend.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft engaged in some strange behavior with regard to its WinGet project, finding out all the details of an existing open-source project called AppGet by dangling the prospect of a job at Microsoft for its creator, but then in effect killing that open-source project though borrowing many of its ideas.
The nerve of some people, borrowing ideas. That's almost...arrr-like.
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Yeah, except MS made shittons of money off of it, and the developers were not paid,
while if you download some software, the developers have been paid a long time ago, and nobody's losing a cent since you wouldn't have paid for a license in any case (as it wasn't worth the money in the first place).
Also, you seem to be unaware, that literally every single thing MS ever released, was a "borrowed idea". DOS, Windows, Windows NT, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OLE, DOM, Internet Explorer, Active Directory, .NET, you
Bigger question (Score:5, Funny)
How did someone named Rod Littles make it through high school?
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Maybe he *became* the bully? ;)
A proto-SJW, so to speak? ;)
But C# is Open Source (Score:2)
Microsoft has no control over it, as someone said in the article about Java, a few days ago. While I'm no C# expert, I'm guessing its value is significantly diminished without .NET.
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And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen.
Somebody actually *still* argues for Microsoft.
I guess this is how the discussions on November 10th, 1938 must have gone down...
And there is the truth behind it all. (Score:5, Interesting)
the foundation doesn't care about the community
This is the core truth that people need to know about the .NET Foundation. It is completely focused on furthering the goals of Microsoft and exploiting free labor, not for the community but for Microsoft.
And there it is. (Score:2)
If you want open source you need to look SOMEWHERE ELSE, other than anything connected with M$. The only reason they are 'big' on Linux is that no one would be using azure if it didn't support Linux. So they got a 12 gage shotgun stuck in their face with the trigger half pulled. Now they have to act like it was part of the plan all along. Embrace and exterminate is not dead at M$, I expect it to rear it's ugly head sooner or later.
Isn't all successful open source corporate funded? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want open source you need to look SOMEWHERE ELSE, other than anything connected with M$. The only reason they are 'big' on Linux is that no one would be using azure if it didn't support Linux. So they got a 12 gage shotgun stuck in their face with the trigger half pulled. Now they have to act like it was part of the plan all along. Embrace and exterminate is not dead at M$, I expect it to rear it's ugly head sooner or later.
And where would Linux be if several commercial vendors, especially IBM, didn't pump tons of money and devote tons of man hours to it? Linus Torvalds is an extremely remarkable man, but he is just one man. I am confident that if he refused help and funding from mega corporations, Linux wouldn't be the success it is today. I know for a fact that most Java open source is funded by corporations. I don't even think it's bad. Companies are going to write custom software. Donating it to the world or collaborating with your competitors is better than keeping it to yourself, IMHO.
Also, embrace, extend, exterminate was a Gates/Balmer thing. The new guy is pretty cool taking your money for Linux services. Gates and Balmer wanted license sales and total control. The new MS is more flexible about how they make money and recurring revenue from cloud services is far more reliable and lucrative than selling licenses. So yeah, it COULD theoretically be an elaborate long-term 3D chess move to kill Linux....or Satya Nadella just loves making money and having the stock price rise...which do you think is the case?
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Or you could understand that the problem isn't **all** corporations and this isn't about Linux but about Microsoft and how THEY do things and have since they started. The under 30 crowd doesn't get who Microsoft was/is and thinks because they have a normal CEO now (and not Balmer) that they are somehow in a new era of sainthood. Micro$oft is the same as they always have been.
They really aren't "the same," they like money now (Score:4, Insightful)
Micro$oft is the same as they always have been.
Few tech companies are the same as they were 20 years ago. Also MS isn't a bunch of saints. They're business people. They want your money. They Gates/Balmer era was kind of weird, in retrospect. For example, why extinguish Java? Why not just make money off it? They gained so little with J++ and they really could have lead by just being nice to Java.
I think what most forget is how MS dominated the server market for everything but the biggest spenders in the 90s. I think Windows server would have a much larger marketshare if they had just played nice with everyone. Corporations wanted to run windows because it was perceived as being easier to maintain and having a more accessible better talent pool. Windows Server 2000 and NT 4.0 had a MASSIVE marketshare and huge influx of MCSE's ready to help it grow. The Balmer stupidity largely squandered their lead.
Tangent aside, the Gates/Balmer era was illogical. Nadella appears to be much more logical. He wants your money. He seems much less interested in controlling you or limiting your options. Turns out it's more profitable to delight your customers than force your products on them.
I used to be anti-MS & now I am neutral about them. I love my XBox games pass for Windows. I don't mind Windows, especially compared to MacOS, I can't say I LIKE it, but I appreciate how much faster it is and how I can build my own machine, but I only use it for games. Azure isn't bad. Their server products are fine. I'm no fan, but I could make a living writing C# if the market was better than Java.
I distinctly remember the MS of old. I used to rant on forums like this about them. Today's MS is not yesterday's MS. You can say the same about Apple, Netflix, and Google as well. Companies in tech typically evolve and evolve quickly. While I find Google's trajectory disappointing, MS's has been a pleasant and very unexpected surprise.
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At this point a Windows machine is quite a good development environment. You can develop and test your program on Windows and Linux. With WSL2 and Windows 11 you even have hardware accelerated GUI and GPGPU support. Their dev tools work on Windows and Linux and they are also adding Android now.
At this point it just seems like Microsoft wants to make good tools and services that people are willing to pay for and they are not as interested in control anymore. Look at how much they support Python now. They are
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IIRC, the Java thing was about lock-in. People could leave Windows and take their Java applications to another platform. If those Java applications only worked on Microsoft's platform, then lock-in is maintained.
The whole thing was about protecting Windows sales, not selling Java-based products.
Doesn't make sense to me (Score:2)
IIRC, the Java thing was about lock-in. People could leave Windows and take their Java applications to another platform. If those Java applications only worked on Microsoft's platform, then lock-in is maintained.
The whole thing was about protecting Windows sales, not selling Java-based products.
I don't see it that way. There wouldn't have been a mass migration off Windows. A few "could" quit, but they won't. It's like smoking. Nicorette is theoretically a threat to Phillip Morris, but most who say they're going to quit smoking either never do or do it much much later than they planned. The same applies from getting of a working platform.
Except in this case, MS could have played nice and sold a ton of SQL Server licenses...or made their own Java application server and taken on WebLogic and
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You forgot that Windows was complete and utter crap back in the day. We ran Windows because we HAD to (often due to licensing deals).
If everyone programmed in proper Java instead of Microsoft's bastardization of it which later became .NET, Sun would probably still be around. Sun was making efforts into the desktop/workstation space as were a ton of others (BeOS, Linux, OS/2) and Java made a lot of it possible.
However if you had any large number of Windows licenses (Microsoft Gold partners etc) you were proh
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Programmed in proper Java? Eww.... No!!
C#/.NET is so much better than mucking about with the insanities of Java and it's myriad JDKs.
No slashdot, my post does not look like ascii art.
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I sold my Google stock and replaced it with Microsoft stock... even though Google's made much more money for me. I would never have done that a decade ago, but Google has demonstrated that "do no evil" is probably not forefront [reuters.com] in the minds [theguardian.com] of their executive board.
On the flipside, Nadella has shown a complete disinterest in the historical Microsoft bullshit tactics; it wasn't just the honeymoon phase either, because I still haven't seen any obvious signs of a return to form, and it's been half a decade. So
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In my own experience, there is nothing special about Microsoft in this story - I have seen first hand the same things happening with much much smaller companies, and with projects which were born and bred open source.
There will _always_ be tension between the company which built and maintains the core product, the commercial partners and the wider community of practitioners and end users.
The fact th
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And where would Linux be if several commercial vendors, especially IBM, didn't pump tons of money and devote tons of man hours to it?
It would be an amazing operating system with fewer drivers. Linux beat the commercial OSes before it got corporate support.
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you couldn't be more wrong. plenty of features has been written by someone employed by a commercial vendor.
file systems, networking code, schedulers, graphics, you name it
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Yeah it would still be an amazing operating system.
Re:Isn't all successful open source corporate fund (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Linux was coming along quite nicely in the late '90s. IBM didn't get involved for charity, it got involved because people liked Linux a hell of a lot more than AIX and wanted to run instances of it on Z series machines. By that time, it wasn't just Linus all by his lonesome, RedHat, Suse, and Debian had been around a while.
That's not to say that IBM's input didn't matter or wasn't appreciated, just that Linux would be here one way or the other, in SPITE of Microsoft's best efforts.
MS isn't playing nice because it's heart grew three sizes one day, it's playing nice because once the chairmaster left they realized that otherwise their fate would be slowly burning their accumulated wealth kicking a dead whale down the beach while Linux and Apple ate their lunch.
But a scorpion remains a scorpion. The instant they see an opportunity, they'll be right back to their old ways. When they start open sourcing Windows' core, it might show a real change but I'm not holding my breath.
No one got fired for choosing IBM (Score:3)
The old saying "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" is the most brilliant slogan I've ever heard. You don't have to like IBM, just know that
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Sure, in the '90s. IBM wasn't interested then either. Not long after is when Linux started taking over everything and then IBM got interested. IBM got into Linux because it HAD to. It saw that Linux would be necessary if it was to stay relevant.
MS is more than it's current CEO. It is still packed with people and culture from Gates and the chairmaster. It has not fundamentally re-configured in a way that suggests that peaceful co-existence will be the long-term strategy.
Or to your point, it HAS to (Score:2)
IBM got into Linux because it HAD to. It saw that Linux would be necessary if it was to stay relevant.
Why doesn't the same apply to Microsoft? They've lost. Their relevance faded every day while their competitors on the server side got stronger. It seems to me like they are fundamentally reconfiguring to stop their marketshare loss and pave a new future.
.NET and Windows Server to some AWS-based alternative.
It's survival, not virtue. They have to make themselves relevant or watch as customer after customer migrates their mission critical systems off
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MS doesn't act as if they've had the "horrible realization" yet. Note that IBM no longer even offers AIX except for POWER7. It no longer has enough people assigned to AIX to make a course change viable without a long ramp up.
Like the scorpion in the fable, MS has acknowledged that it is in danger of drowning. Also like the scorpion, it has not put it's stinger aside or demonstrated a change in it's fundamental nature.
When you've proven yourself to be a force of darkness for the better part of 40 years, it
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I don't know who you work for, but you need to get your head out of your butt. Our parent company is a Fortune 50 company and they have a pretty good-sized Linux group. (We got a nice discount when we started buying our Red Hat subscriptions through them.) When we had a meeting with them a few years ago, one of our programmers mentioned we were using C#. One of their programmers asked why, and the tone in his voice was something like "What are you, stupid?"
Windows only rules on the desktop, and only because
It's quite cozy in here (Score:2)
I don't know who you work for, but you need to get your head out of your butt.
Classy, dude! Nothing says I have a brilliant point like a comment like that.
Our parent company is a Fortune 50 company and they have a pretty good-sized Linux group. (We got a nice discount when we started buying our Red Hat subscriptions through them.) When we had a meeting with them a few years ago, one of our programmers mentioned we were using C#. One of their programmers asked why, and the tone in his voice was something like "What are you, stupid?"
Windows only rules on the desktop, and only because everyone needs to interoperate with them. If we could figure out a way to make that easier or unnecessary, their reign would be over.
What do you want me to say...Congratulations on having a job?
Perhaps you should reread this discussion is about the past, not the present. Linux is quite popular today. It really is the only realistic option for running mission-critical large-scale apps. However, it got there because of major corporate donors. The point was that IBM really helped push the needle from making Linux an interesting project to the mainstream d
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Apparently, I have responded to the wrong comment, and given that I can't even find what I thought I was responding to, I'm guessing I posted in the wrong thread. It's especially irritating because I nearly always include a quote from the comment I'm responding to (partially to track it, when something like this happens), and this time I didn't.
Sorry about that.
no, thank you. (Score:2)
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where would Linux be if several commercial vendors, especially IBM, didn't pump tons of money and devote tons of man hours to it?
Irrelevant to the point being made, which is that Microsoft is not a good citizen of the Linux ecosystem. Or, you know, any system at all.
Also, embrace, extend, exterminate was a Gates/Balmer thing.
Yum, Kool-Aid! Oh yeaahhh!
If you expected anything different... (Score:2)
...or if you ever thought they were going to be the "good guys" when it came to open source, you were the fool
Remember this when they "embrace" Linux some more. (Score:2)
Don't fall for it. Don't believe that "Baby, I swear I won't hit you anymore! I changed! I swear! Open one button more, for me,... please...!".
Still the Microsoft we know and hate.
And why wouldn't they? Worked for them. Just not for anyone else.