Keyvan Nayyeri

It's been over two years of my active contributions to .NET open source projects and in this while I've been a coordinator and developer for many projects that were (and are) active. One of my main goals on choosing a project to contribute or create is its effect on the community and its usefulness. I often try to choose some ideas that aren't very common and easy to develop and try to work on things that can help the software rather than the market! I don't care about the popularity of a blogging engine or a code generator tool and usually try to avoid working on such common things. Instead of writing a blog engine, I try to build something that improve blogging engines like BlogML or Graffiti Extras project.

During these two years I found that we actually don't have a .NET open source community. Even though we're calling our projects "open source" and consider our community as an open source community but actually there is almost nothing open source based on the real definition of open source software as what it is defined and supposed generally.

When I go back and forth and take a look at the assistant that I got from others on projects and compare it with what is provided for similar projects on Linux community, more than the past I make sure that open source community is just a decoration to hide the ugly face of Microsoft when it comes to the source code of the software! The core of the .NET open source is limited to some constant names that are contributing to it and we occasionally see someone new on it! Innovation is going to die here and Microsoft hence its community are inspiring ideas from other community and just follow them!

Like Microsoft, many of its community members (not all of them) have bold commercial goals in mind when speaking of open source. It means that if they can't find logical commercial reasons for an open source project then they won't attend it at all.

Moreover, community members don't try to contribute to other projects and usually try to build something from the base! The result is seeing many small projects with 1-2 contributors that often go silence after a short while!

When you view various .NET open source projects, can believe that many of them (even a reasonable number of well-known projects) aren't very active and their activity is strongly correlated to the income for that project. A pure open source project (that I define it as an open source project without commercial goals) is on a dead end on .NET community because whole Microsoft thing is built on top of the commercial goals. The infrastructure is money!!

Unfortunately I've hit the boundary of Microsoft community many times and this is going to be very annoying. My feeling is like someone who is limited to a small room and runs fast around the room and spends much of his energy. That room gets warmer by his activities but he's doing something stupid!

Normally taking care about this stuff wouldn't be so critical on Microsoft community because we have experienced this during these latest two decades but I personally do care about it!

For me, software development is more than a profession or something just for fun. From the beginning I've been thinking about software world as one of the best ways to help to the humanity and I'm pretty sure that it's possible to help the world with software and code. And you simply know that open source is one of the best ways to achieve this and probably the best way!

Sadly I believed that open source on Microsoft community is nothing but commercial goals at the end so it's stopping me from more activity because of the huge space between this and my ideas!

The more annoying thing is what many guys have said before and that is the fact that Microsoft bundles open source for what it wants! It seems that Microsoft does love an open source project that can help its commercial goals and does not like an open source project that can't help its goals!

Day after day I get tired from hearing about open source news on Microsoft community while I can't feel any goodness about it as an open source developer on this community (not a big one, just a small one who has done something very very small)! Open source at Microsoft is nothing but investing a wheel for several times! I build something open source and free to let the people get their hands on cheaper software with better quality but someone comes out and makes money for it! I don't want that money! I'd like to see some users who enjoy my code without paying anything for it! Anyone can get money for his own work but not for mine I think this is the reason that I choose New BSD license for many of my projects to let others use my code easily but I don't expect them to be this cruel!

All in all, I'm thinking about moving my open source activities out of Microsoft community and switch to a bigger world! I'm reaching to the point that Mike Gunderloy had reached last year and I may do the same to switch to the other world!