

Why OSS projects are treated like "products" in .NET OSS - Aaronontheweb
http://dimebrain.com/post/893694502/projects-vs-products

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troygoode
I "own" and participate in several open source .NET projects and have
definitely found this to be very true. At the same time, I've found that it
varies by project depending on the intended audience of the project itself.
Two examples:

One of the projects that I started is a "starter kit" to get some simple user
administration screens into a new MVC web app very quickly. This seems to
really appeal to newcomers to Asp.Net MVC (most likely because of the starter
kit nature of it) and as such I've found that it gets treated much more like a
product: lots of requests for me to add new features with VERY few people
willing to actually contribute new features themselves. More people download
the binaries than download & build the source.
[<http://github.com/TroyGoode/MembershipStarterKit>]

On the other hand I participate in a project that is a C# version of Rails'
migrations. This tends to be used by .Net developers who have either exposure
to RoR or are otherwise more advanced than your run-of-the-mill drag & drop
.Net SharePoint dev. We are actually seeing more contributions than support
requests for this project (though it isn't in heavy use either way.) More
people download & build the source than download the binaries.
[<http://github.com/TroyGoode/fluentmigrator>]

That said, I suspect that this isn't _entirely_ a symptom of the .Net
ecosystem - Rails or Sinatra or Gem certainly get treated as products, right?

~~~
Aaronontheweb
Speaking of which, I'm going to check out your MVC starter kit later today
since I'm just getting started with that.

~~~
troygoode
Great! Let me know if you have any questions. You can email me at
troygoode@gmail.com.

If you're feeling especially generous, any feedback you can offer in terms of
tweaking the "getting started" directions to make it easier to... erm... get
started would be very much appreciated.

~~~
Aaronontheweb
Will do!

