The .NET and C# ecosystem in the open source community is collapsing.
This is a post I originally hadn’t planned to write, but just a few hours ago, with the latest updates I’ve seen, I feel obligated to share this with everyone here for .NET or C#.
Table of Contents
1 - MediatR, AutoMapper and MassTransit Change License
The first thing we need to look at is where this problem comes from. Yesterday, April 2nd, we saw how three of the most popular libraries in the C# ecosystem switched their license from completely open source to a commercial license.
First came AutoMapper and MediatR, both maintained by the same person. Here’s the blog explaining the reasons: https://www.jimmybogard.com/automapper-and-mediatr-going-commercial/
Later in the day, we found that the next version of MassTransit (v9) will also have a commercial license; here’s the explanation: https://masstransit.io/introduction/v9-announcement.
And the reasons are simple, just as I already mentioned in the post about Open Source, where we mainly discussed Mock since in August 2023 it made some updates to try to monetize. The people who maintain MediatR, AutoMapper, and MassTransit are tired of maintaining it for free and want to make some money.
As I said in that post, maintaining projects takes a lot of time and is not profitable. Yet everyone wants updates and new features immediately. That’s just not realistic.
As a curious note, although he left it as a mere anecdote, Jimmy Bogard, the creator of MediatR and AutoMapper, said this on Reddit two months ago:
Obviously, he changed his mind, but it’s interesting how he used the word "never."
As I always say, I think it’s fine for everyone to do what they want with the licenses for their open source packages.
2 - The Failure of the .NET Foundation
This is where the .NET Foundation comes in. For those who don’t know, the .NET Foundation is a Microsoft-led community that supports development and collaboration in the .NET ecosystem. The idea was to ensure the long-term sustainability of open source software development within .NET.
Obviously, this hasn’t worked. In the last 18-24 months, we’ve seen many popular libraries in .NET migrate to a paid model. This includes IdentityServer, for example, but not just that—ImageSharp, FluentAssertions, QuestPDF, Mock, and just yesterday, MediatR, AutoMapper, and MassTransit. All libraries that are used massively in any enterprise project. These are the ones for now, but if these changes succeed, who knows which libraries will be next.
In my opinion, everything that’s happening points directly at the .NET Foundation and Microsoft, who clearly are not providing the necessary support for open source packages. What they should do is create a rewards system or simply pay a salary, but if all the support libraries get is exposure at a mini session during NetConf and a premium subscription for the .NET User Group Meetup (which they own), then obviously it’s not worth it. What would make it worth it is real financial compensation.
A lot of people will tell me it’s OpenSource and whatever, but the reality is that most who use these packages are companies—big companies that pay for Windows licenses, pay for Visual Studio, and many have everything in Azure. For that reason, it would be totally normal for Microsoft to allocate a yearly fund to distribute among the libraries within the .NET Foundation, since thanks to those libraries people use .NET.
If there is any problem you can add a comment bellow or contact me in the website's contact form
