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This you? https://isdotnetopen.com/

After .NET Core I was one of the people that really thought "maybe Microsoft has changed at least in the .NET division, let's not be prejudiced, if they want to make FOSS let's give it a try". But of course they showed their hand and I'd have to be a fool to believe this is a platform worth investing myself in.

It's even killed my enthusiasm with F#, despite it almost growing into its own thing after how much MS has neglected it.




To summarize: .NET, the entire platform and language and ecosystem and everything, should be completely and utterly avoided because:

- the ability for the open-source extension to, at the user's option, additionally interface with existing closed-source tools (in a non-license-affecting way), was added

- they wanted to limit hot-reload in .NET 6 because of quality issues (but reverted after people disagreed)

- Microsoft's debugger isn't open-source (even though there still is a popular open-source one)

- a clerical error resulted in all the repos the .NET foundation were administrating getting moved to the .NET foundation's GitHub, including ones that weren't supposed to (which, being incredibly obviously a mistake, was instantly reverted)

If you call these things 'showing their hand', I would call that motivated reasoning. I consider it impressive that a site dedicated to collating all the idiotic drama in order to smear the participants, can only find four examples, despite targeting literally Microsoft. By comparison if you started trying to collate the community drama for Rust or Golang (or god forbid Java) you'd be at it all day.

Please stop linking this website.


> a clerical error

It was not a clerical error. E.g. nobody typed wrong command or something. That was a decision .NET Foundation heads made and executed. AFAIR https://github.com/clairernovotny

> was instantly reverted

No, it was not instantly reverted. Took us over 1 month to get our repository back under our full and undivided control.


- the ability to embrace, extend and extinguish the open source C# development solution, in the most obvious of ways

- they wanted to disadvantage open source users because of their proprietary solution

- they gatekeep the debugger while pretending it's an open source ecosystem

- several "clerical errors" demonstrating a pattern of undermining an open ecosystem

Yes, except for your charitable wording of a company's hostile "interpretation" of an open community, those are the reasons why it should be avoided.


I guess it depends on context. Is it the ideal FOSS environment? No.

Does it get close enough for jazz for the businesses who use it? Yes.

In the end that's who .NET seems to actually be for, that's who mostly use it. For those of us in that situation, it's a pretty damn good choice.


Am I reading that right... no debugger..?

That can't be the case?


I don't want this to sound like I'm defending having a proprietary debugger, but a lot of the tools that people use are proprietary even while they think they're using FOSS. For example, Visual Studio Code + Python? All that IntelliSense is a proprietary Microsoft binary and can't be used with non-Microsoft products. Are you running an open-source fork of VSCode? You can't run that plugin. Want VSCode + JavaScript + IntelliCode? Proprietary again.

As the link notes, there is Samsung's open source debugger, but it's not the one that is used by any of the common IDEs (VSCode, Visual Studio, or Rider).

It's certainly not an amazing situation that I want to be defending, but most people look past the fact that they're running plenty of proprietary stuff inside their VSCode editor and if you're looking past proprietary extensions for JS or Python, it makes sense to also look past proprietary extensions for C#.


> Visual Studio Code + Python

The perfect example of why Microsoft can't be trusted. VSCode had a great open source Python extension which everyone used. Then Microsoft hired the developer and switched to recommending their closed source extension instead. VSCode extensions are then licensed so they cannot be used with VSCode forks. It really shows Microsoft's mindset.


So its MS fault for paying and hiring the best person to do the job, meanwhile no one picks up or fork the work to continue the open source?

Man, people are entitled and just want free labor…


You can download the official .NET debugger but its license only permits you to use it with VS and VSCode.

Luckily, there are various third-party debuggers available. E.g. from Samsung (MIT licensed) and Jetbrains (proprietary for their IDEs).

https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg


The debugger is largely proprietary.




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