Future of community projects in .Net

Question

Hi guys,

I've been lately thinking about future of open source community projects in .Net. What raises this problem is actually Microsoft devouring all those projects and replacing them with its own ones. Every new version of .Net framework brings not only clr or language improvements, but also some super new features which slowly, but steadily start to replace community created ones.

Just to mention few:

-ASP.NET MVC - there were some ports of Java Mvc frameworks like e.g. Maverick.Net, why weren't they promoted, or at least left in peace with slowly growing user interest.

-Entity Framework - we all know about NHibernate, but if you took a closer look at Entity Framework 4, you would see that they are becoming similar, especially looking at Code-First for EF

-MsSql CE 4 - replacing Sqlite

-Orchard project - replacing DotNetNuke, N2Cms and others...

and many others... Now the question is: what consequences come from this process? Do you think that it may totally stop bigger community projects/frameworks? And then make .Net development tied to only-Ms things?

I'm not "very against", because EF+Wcf Ria+DynamicData+Data Annotations=rocks!, but isn't all this going in wrong direction?

Answer 1

Why should open source projects be protected from competition? And why is this a problem in the .Net world only?

Answer 2

Competition and alternatives are always a good thing. All applications and frameworks have positives and negatives, so there is always a place for alternatives.

Additionally Microsoft has a free browser and it seems open community projects are doing reasonably well in that space. If Microsoft/Apple/Google start doing a similar piece of software to a community project does not mean the end of that project or value of the project.

Answer 3

Open source is still necessary because huge companies like Microsoft prefer not to take too much risks in innovation. They watch smaller group of people creating value by innovating, then they either buy them (unit) or copy them (nhibernate).

Google, apple, sun, IBM, they all the same strategy because it pays. A lot.