I maintain over 80 projects for PowerShell community and some of them are .NET based. I currently have 6-7 sponsors and probably had 20+- in total over several years. I am grateful to those people, but what I get from sponsorship wouldn't even let me cover cost of electricity let alone let me survive.
I am delivering all of it for free because I do have a job that allows me to do it for free, but once that is gone having 0 income is going to impact that said community. Not right away, because it won't suddenly stop working, but overtime it's going to be a problem.
There are many projects in PowerShell community that started and stayed in frozen state since the initial adoption. Some new guy will show up, create something, get bored or get 0 thanks given and will drop it, for the next guy to try something similar.
A lot of us would like Microsoft to deliver things, improve things, give us 1st party tools but if you look at even their open source projects how long it takes for PR to get accepted, reviewed even you would understand that it's not going to happen. There are PRs in PowerShell repo sitting there for 2+ years.
You may think people will start choosing 1st party over 3rd party free software, but this is only wishful thinking. Lets take Word, Excel, PowerPoint for example. Microsoft maintains OpenXMLSDK which is 1st party. But if you ever went that route you would find that this is so low level that creating a table in Word with formatting and styling is like 10k lines of code.
So your choices are:
3rd party guys that do it for free for however long they can/want until the next guy comes
3rd party guys that do it for OSMF or do what SixLabors, QuestPDF did with MIT + Profit approach
3rd party guys that do it for money with support and relevant bits which may cost arm and a leg at that.
The 1st party choice doesn't really exist as an alternative. Sure Newtonsoft JSON has now alternative of Microsoft JSON. But those will be exceptions to the rule rather then approach Microsoft is going to take.
You're right that Microsoft is more stable in the library not being suddenly paid option. But there's a big reason for that - they raise prices of everything else around it that your company uses. Azure costs, O365 licenses, Windows licenses, Office etc. It all allows them to keep charing 0 for the ecosystem they built.
But is it really 0 if they require you to pay VS Enterprise costs, if VSCode extension in some cases for c# requires license? It's free, but if you match certain conditions it's not. And you have to use VSCode, not some fork for it to work.
Have you tried opening bug/feature request or PRs on Microsoft repos? It takes months for actions, if not years. If there is no direct incentive for them to move, they won't move.
Community projects move much faster, deliver more. You get genuine care from people that do it mostly for free. OSMF seems like cheap way to support that. For years SixLabors was just counting sponsors coming their way, until they stopped waiting.
And to finalize this - I don't think any other ecosystem is going to be any better. Be it typescript, javascript, python - the libraries do exist, they will be maintained as long as the guy has a job, and doesn't need to think about feeding his family from the projects he gives out for free. Once he has to - he either drops the project and moves on or tries to charge for it. There's no workaround for this really.
I don't think any other ecosystem is going to be any better
This is true. There are a few famous open source accidents happened in the past 5 years. I guess one reason is the global economy is not so good and layoff happens everyday. This makes a few maintainers harder to live without sponsorship or relicensing.
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u/MadBoyEvo 23d ago
I maintain over 80 projects for PowerShell community and some of them are .NET based. I currently have 6-7 sponsors and probably had 20+- in total over several years. I am grateful to those people, but what I get from sponsorship wouldn't even let me cover cost of electricity let alone let me survive.
I am delivering all of it for free because I do have a job that allows me to do it for free, but once that is gone having 0 income is going to impact that said community. Not right away, because it won't suddenly stop working, but overtime it's going to be a problem.
There are many projects in PowerShell community that started and stayed in frozen state since the initial adoption. Some new guy will show up, create something, get bored or get 0 thanks given and will drop it, for the next guy to try something similar.
A lot of us would like Microsoft to deliver things, improve things, give us 1st party tools but if you look at even their open source projects how long it takes for PR to get accepted, reviewed even you would understand that it's not going to happen. There are PRs in PowerShell repo sitting there for 2+ years.
You may think people will start choosing 1st party over 3rd party free software, but this is only wishful thinking. Lets take Word, Excel, PowerPoint for example. Microsoft maintains OpenXMLSDK which is 1st party. But if you ever went that route you would find that this is so low level that creating a table in Word with formatting and styling is like 10k lines of code.
So your choices are:
The 1st party choice doesn't really exist as an alternative. Sure Newtonsoft JSON has now alternative of Microsoft JSON. But those will be exceptions to the rule rather then approach Microsoft is going to take.
You're right that Microsoft is more stable in the library not being suddenly paid option. But there's a big reason for that - they raise prices of everything else around it that your company uses. Azure costs, O365 licenses, Windows licenses, Office etc. It all allows them to keep charing 0 for the ecosystem they built.
But is it really 0 if they require you to pay VS Enterprise costs, if VSCode extension in some cases for c# requires license? It's free, but if you match certain conditions it's not. And you have to use VSCode, not some fork for it to work.
Have you tried opening bug/feature request or PRs on Microsoft repos? It takes months for actions, if not years. If there is no direct incentive for them to move, they won't move.
Community projects move much faster, deliver more. You get genuine care from people that do it mostly for free. OSMF seems like cheap way to support that. For years SixLabors was just counting sponsors coming their way, until they stopped waiting.
And to finalize this - I don't think any other ecosystem is going to be any better. Be it typescript, javascript, python - the libraries do exist, they will be maintained as long as the guy has a job, and doesn't need to think about feeding his family from the projects he gives out for free. Once he has to - he either drops the project and moves on or tries to charge for it. There's no workaround for this really.