Interesting. I think MS has its work cut out for itself to build a large open source community anywhere near the sizes of Linux, GNU or Jakarta. Especially if its under a dodgy MS licence. All I’ve seen so far have been C# ports of existing Java open source projects (like NAnt, NUnit etc). Is there really much of a C# open source community out there?[James Strachan’s Radio Weblog]
As someone who’s turned most of their development attention to .NET (splitter), I’m feeling kind of isolated. OSS is totally alien to the existing MS community and the Java community view .NET as the plague. An umbrella is badly needed for the .NET OSS community.
How long until we see dotnet.apache.org? 🙂
C# is similar enough to Java that it isn’t hard to pick up for java developers who haven’t rejected it merely on the basis of its heritage. As companies (like Joe’s clients) start to demand .net stuff, developers coming in to .net who are used to the availability of OSS tools for java will probably start to produce equivalents for the .net world. Although what Microsoft were thinking with their first workspaces license escapes me. Unless they offer a compelling technical reason not to use sourceforge I think they may struggle. The community will decide, and it doesn’t really matter whether the tools are hosted on sourceforge, apache, or gotdotnet workspaces.
Darren Hobbs 