Announcing new governance model and project contributions to the .NET Foundation

With more than 30 projects on the docket and a governance model well underway, the .NET Foundation is poised for future growth.

Microsoft is making headlines today for its decision to open source its popular .NET development stack, which will now be maintained under the stewardship of the .NET Foundation. This should be welcome news to the millions of developers who use .NET to build high quality applications and services that can scale from needs of individual developers to large enterprises.

As part of its announcement last spring, Microsoft released .NET code to the open source community. Today’s news builds onto that, as Microsoft aims to further make .NET Core available across platforms for Linux and Mac. The company will open source additional key .NET platform components through the foundation.

Operational Changes

Increasingly, this community has shaped the role of the .NET Foundation as a forum for dialogue about the platform’s future direction. Earlier this year, we announced the formation of the .NET Foundation, a new independent forum for commercial and community developers to engage in open development and collaboration around the growing collection of open source technologies for .NET. 

As the .NET Foundation provides the framework for making open development of .NET the norm, community feedback has greatly influenced the foundation’s structure and operations since its creation. We are excited to see this forward progress in such a short period of time. More and more, .NET technologies are using an open process that is designed to be transparent and to foster involvement and direct code contributions from the community.

In addition to the Board of Directors, an Advisory Council is being established to ensure the general community is involved and informed of decisions about the future direction and health of the .NET ecosystem. If you would be interested to help guide governance of this process, please consider joining the .NET Foundation Advisory Council: join the discussion on the forum and send Advisory Council nominations to contact@dotnetfoundation.org.

New Projects Onboard

The .NET Foundation initially took stewardship of 24 .NET open source projects, including the .NET Compiler Platform “Roslyn” and the ASP.NET family of open source projects. Xamarin also contributed six unique projects to the Foundation, including a couple of open source email libraries.

In recent months, several additional projects have been added to the .NET Foundation roster, bringing the number to more than 30, including Thinktecture’s IdentityServer and IdentityManager, Orchard, and several projects from the Outercurve Foundation, among them Nuget, Kudu and the ASP.NET Ajax Library. Moving forward, we will continue working with the Outercurve Foundation to migrate relevant .NET projects to the .NET Foundation.

"The foundation is a natural progression in our evolution as a community focused .NET framework.  We recognize that without a community Orchard would not have found the success and wide adoption it has today.  The .NET foundation is built on those principals and we couldn't be more pleased to be a founding member project of this organization," says Ylan Kunstler Orchard Project Steering Committee member and founder of the Orchard Harvest global conferences.

“The .NET Foundation offers a great opportunity to increase the visibility of our project and broaden our ability to attract new users and contributors to Thinktecture IdentityServer and IdentityManager,” said Brock Allen, at Thinktecture.

“Microsoft’s new commitment to fostering open source projects is great, and we at Thinktecture are happy to show our support for the .NET Foundation and help foster a vibrant .NET ecosystem,” said Dominick Baier, at Thinktecture.

Here you can view the full listing of .NET Foundation projects and programs.

On behalf of the .NET Foundation Board of Directors, we want to thank the many people who have contributed to the foundations continuing growth. Onward!

Gianugo Rabellino
Board Member, .NET Foundation
Senior Director of Open Source Communities at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.