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What makes a good open-source project?
As .NET gains momentum in the developer community, many people (including this editor) have been saying that .NET needs a stronger, more vibrant open-source community to counteract the innovation that's been coming from its competitors' communities. What makes for a good open-source project, one that the community can back?
In a weblog entry on java.net, Ozgur Akan points out what he believes the 15 points to answer the question "How to make her (the community) love you (the open source project)", listing them out as:- First of all you have to create a quailty product which finds a solution for a specific problem.
- Have a vivid mental image so called "vison".
- Have passion to finish what you have started.
- Have leadership, people needs leaders to be motivated.
- Always take the first steps, write the first code, draw the first diagram etc.
- You must be in communication with others. Tell about your project everywhere!
- Create detailed documentation about any idea or code.
- Create a attractive web site.
- Give deadlines for every action even for yourself. ("A goal is just a dream with a deadline.")
- Watch a successful open source project.
- Do never release buggy versions.
- Provide patches as soon as possbile.
- Create easliy installable software.
- Inform users that your project is actively being developed or maintained.
- Create comments for every line of your code.
Does this fit with your experience? And does .NET really need a strong open-source community to survive, or is this just wishful thinking from ex-patriate Java guys, homesick for the world they left behind?
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Message #133739
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What makes a good open-source project?
with a few exception it sounds like this is what it would take to accomplish just about anything.
-Mathew Nolton
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Message #133753
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What makes a good open-source project?
Refresh my memory, what innovations have come from the competitive open source movement? I mean besides the SCO lawsuits, potential patent infringements, and the occasional self-righteous tirade claiming that anybody who sells their software in in fact Satan.
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Message #133755
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Saxon.NET - A .NET Open Source project for you to rate...
I cant imagine a more perfect opportunity to stick the Saxon.NET OS project neck out and see what kind of feedback we can get from the .NET community regarding the project in general, our reason for developing the project in the first place, does our reason for doing it fit into what the community believes to be something of value (in other words does XSLT 2.0 functionality on .NET leave you nodding your head up or sideways, a slight shoulder shrug, did you have just enough declarative-based programming with XSLT 1.0 to say "When is XQuery gonna be ready? thats not soon enough..." etc...)
Come on community! Stick it to us and make us stand responsible for what we have done, have not done, should have done, should not have done... etc... In the mean time Im going to go back the the project blog and post my own evaluation of how I think we have done - based on the 15 questions posed in this post - Ill publish as I go... You can find the project blog right here:
http://www.x2x2x.org/x2x2x/home/project_areas/project_blog/
The biggest question I have which - beyond the general XSLT community - I have not posed to an extended .NET development group is this:
Do you see XSLT 2.0 as absolutely fundamental to:
- .NET in general?
- Your own .NET development work?
- The survival of .NET?
- Dont care, I cant stand XSLT anyway...?
The next question is:
- Are you waiting for the C# and .NET framework version before you want to even touch the project?
- Or are you excited by the fact that you can take your existing Java code with calls to the Saxon Java extensions, compile it with IKVMC, and - BAM! - Youre now running on .NET instead?
- Does the idea of using the TrAX API for transforming XML on .NET make your day feel complete and your life suddenly more secure?
- Did you know you could even do these things using Saxon.NET Phase One?
- Do you even care? :)
Regarding XSLT 2.0 and .NET my personal opinion is pretty simple - I love the power and simplicity that XSLT offers me in transforming my XML from one form into another form or format. I have looked forward to the release of XSLT 2.0 and the additional features it would bring with it for almost a year. With 90% of my dev work on .NET I hoped for the best but feared the worst and when Mark Fussell "announced" .NET 2.0 would not contain XSLT 2.0 support I decided it was important enough to me and my development to put forth the necessary effort to bring Saxon over. Between myself and Pieter Siegers we built the site, announced the project, and within 48 hours had a fantastic development group assembled and within a month it was even better... that brought us to this first release... The process was fairly easy as far as that all went but we also chose a pretty hot topic to focus on so it was easy to get support for it.
Anyway, hopefully with some comments from the community we can find out what we have done right, wrong, not at all, or whatever else you feel needs to be brought to our attention so that Saxon.NET can be both a successful open source project AND a successful XSLT 2.0 (BTW... It does XQuery 1.0 transforms just as well but with native .NET 2.0 support for XQuery the only big advantage will come when porting over exising Java/Saxon extension code or if you would prefer to use the two together in a similar Type system that doesnt require use of the wrapper classes I developed in C# to use native .NET streams for containing the results of the transforms.
Thanks in advance!!!
<M:D/>
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Message #133795
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Re: What makes a good open-source project?
Nice post. Those points make alot of sense to me.
I don't think that .Net needs a 'strong open-source community to survive' but I think .Net is stronger with a community that can plug the gaps, create extensions and explore opportunites and innovations. The open-source community allows geeks to explore and think and isn't it better for .Net if this is happening in .Net and not Java? So I think fostering the open-source community is something that should be in Microsoft's interests.
In the world of Java there are many companies. In the world of .Net there (with a few exceptions) is just one.
In the world of Java, an open source project can create something that is 'another option' and people will use it because they are used to having lots of options.
In the world of .Net, an open source project can do the same thing and people are less likely to use it because they are used to only having one option.
I think the mindset of the average Microsoft developer is different. The average Microsoft developer is traditionally a Mort who just wants to use the recommended tools to get stuff done. I think the average Microsoft developer is changing, and so the support for .Net open source is getting larger and louder.
If having a viable open source community is important to Microsoft, then they could do a few things:
1. Stop saying that open source is bad. But rather something more like 'open source is good in certain situations'.
2. Put a Microsoft person as a 'buddy' on open source projects that have achieved a certain momentum.
3. Look for ways to leverage open source efforts rather than replacing them. A good example of this replacement is how VSTS unit test is almost identical to NUnit. If replacement is happening because of licensing issues, then tell the open source community (via the project buddies?) which licenses should be used (or better yet provide one to be used) so that open source projects are extended and not eclipsed. If the replacement is happening for a reason (such as "we want to build on top of a base that we control"), then just explain the reason.
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Message #133829
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We better add MONO into this conversation before we get to far
100% in agree with all your comments and I especially appreciate the 3 bullets you closed up with. While #1 is necessary before #2 could even become a reality I think we had better get the MONO Project into this conversation - MONO, for those of you that dont know, is an implementation of the CLI ECMA specification, or as we all know it, the .NET platform. The run time and C# compiler have been around for a while but it wasnt until June 30th that the project reached a final 1.0 status and was released with a complete implementation of the .NET Framework v.1.1 - completely open source! The project is the heart and soul of Miguel de Icaza, CTO and visionary leader of Ximian, somewhat recently acquired by Novell. It was originally intended for Linux and UNIX but since Miguel "officially" announced the project when MS, HP, and Intel first submitted C# and the CLI specs to the ECMA for standardization back in August of 2000, and especially over the last year, the project has garnered a HUGE amount of community support and as a result has been released for MacOS X(v.3) and Windows.
So in what amounts to less than 45 days ago the .NET platform and C# have suddenly become somewhat of the deFacto standard for what I think will ultimately become what will probably be coined "Open Source 2.0" or something else similar representing the fact that the .NET (rather, CLI) platform IS THE OPEN SOURCE STANDARD!!! It's absolutely incredible to me how much the MONO project could ultimately shift the focus of open source towards the .NET/CLI platform when the focus of so many other open source projects have been driving away from it... Add to this the fact that IKVM.NET v.0.8 (the Java VM project for the .NET platform headed by Jeroen Frijters, a visionary in his own right) shipped with MONO 1.0 and you suddenly now have a platform that natively handles both the .NET framework class libraries as well as all supported members of Java Classpath that are a part of the current snapshot of the GNU Classpath project - a good portion of the 1.4 foundation is there, and when combined with the .NET framework makes the parts that are missing seem almost unnecessary (please dont make arguing this one statement a political agenda... Its a very broad and generalized statement and is not meant to downplay the elements of Java 1.4 that are not currently a part of the GNU classpath project).
From the outside looking in when you take the CLI - or .NET or whatever will ultimately become the "annointed" term we all use - and add the capability to literally run your Java code natively without ANY changes --- You now have the mscorlib.dll, System.*.dll, etc... java.*.dll etc... and what I believe will become a massive and somewhat suddent shift by the software industry to standardize on the CLI because for the first time in the history of modern day computing we actually have a "runtime" standard that runs on 99+% of all platforms of installed-userbase significance. Add to all of this the fact that any language that can currently or can eventually be mapped/compiled to IL or CIL or MSIL or... - what is the proper term these days anyway? - and you now have a heterogeneous environment that will basically run any major development language that you throw at it with the added luxury of being able to access the native API of each language from within any other CLI supported language - DLL hell now becomes Type casting hell - ***THIS THING IS GOING TO BE A FREAKIN' MONSTER!***
With this added to the conversation does anybody else get a kind of "Twilight Zone meets X Files" sort of feeling when the realization is made that the acronym base of Open Source and Operating System is OS? Nah, me neither but its still kind of a cool way to think about it :) BTW... For anybody interested in becoming part of a MONO Project self-help/developer-to-developer/user-to-user style support community I spent this last weekend designing and building the UI for http://www.MONONucleus.com which I want to somehow develop and then donate to the overall MONO effort so that we all have a place to help each get things figured out... No functionality yet but all I plan to do is add an ASP.NET style forum for each section and a general self building FAQ front page for each user type and then send it out for the community to take hold of and do with as they please - would be a neat project to try and decentralize as a GRID style web system - anyway, if you want to help with it or have ideas etc... Ill throw my email up on the site and you can contact me to let me know...
Cheers!
<M:D/>
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Message #133890
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What makes a good open-source project?
Maybe we should start one step earlier and ask what economic/structural role open source can play in a Microsoft dominated .NET world. I'll put Mono aside for now because Mono's objective is pretty clear (provide .NET on Linux). In the Java (and Linux) world one major role of OSS is to provide infrastructure code, based on common CS knowledge and standards. These infrastructures are a hard sell for commercial companies. It's just not economically viable.
I'm talking about stuff like web servers, low end SQL DBMSs, Operating system cores, Servlet and JSP engines, full text search engines, run of the mill development tools, etc. Nobody in the Java space makes money from this. IBM does consulting, high end process management, portals, systems management, high end development and modelling tools, high end DBMS. BEA does high end process management, portals, management tools. Oracle does high end DBMSs. Sun has a hodgepodge of low end application server and operating system stuff on which they don't make any money at all. And then there are a few exceptions of commercial companies that make money on very specialised very high quality infrastructure components, like Tangsol.
In the Windows .NET world, Microsoft makes all the infrastructure and they bundle (in a negative sense) and integrate (in a positive sense) their high end and low end stuff so very well that it doesn't make sense for anyone else to build any infrastructure anymore. As a case in point let's take SQL Server Yukon and the express version of it in particular. Here you have a first rate DBMS, that is years ahead of MySQL feature wise. It's completely free and it will be part of the next Windows version. If you want to scale and cluster, you can always upgrade to its big brother without any code changes. It simply doesn't make sense to build a DBMS when you're on Windows under these circumstances. And it doesn't matter at all if you have a FOSS business model or a proprietary IP based one.
But there is another role of OSS that has a lot of tradition. And that is to bring new ideas from academic research into the public domain and make them work in the real world. I strongly believe that the way to go for FOSS on the .NET Windows platform is to be more innovative than Microsoft. And yes MS does have a huge research budget, but if they publish something, everybody understands it as a committment to support it in the future and stay backwards compatible. And they always have to be very careful to protect their intellectual property and so on. FOSS on Windows is not bound by such commercial obligations, it can and must bring up new stuff, break compatibility and challenge established patterns. And frankly, it is much more interesting to do that than to take Andrew Tannenbaum's book and build another 70ies style operating system or even a copy cat CLR implementation for that matter.
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Message #135306
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.Net needs infrastructure
There is a reason why java is gaining on us on the desktop.
Our company looked at creating an application in both .net and java. We HAD to go java - we used a free IDE (Eclipse), free chart library (JFreeChart), free report library (JFreeReport, JasperReports), free Diagramming library (JGraph), free embedded database (HSqlDB, we will switch to the soon to be released Derby), Search components (Lucene, JClassifier), Data mining libraries (To numerous to name), AI library (joone). We used JGoodies looks and forms for UI. We used jxta for p2p.
Seriously - our cost of software was nothing! When we compared it to .net we would have been up for royalties upwards of 35%, initial license costs of over 140,000$ for the development team + one time licenses.
For web development we can't go past the .net libraries(specifically infragistics), but seriously, we made a profit after 16 sales, compared to an estimated 145 with .net
The difference in break even point was about 160,000$.
For a small dev team there is no option on the desktop until .net steps up.
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