Microsoft angers the open source community
Microsoft risks losing all of its open source efforts thanks to a storm brewing in the .NET community – the company’s leading development toolset and core software framework.
A controversial business decision within the company has left many questions about its commitment to open source. Multiple company sources say the decision has also angered many developers within the company. But they were told not to complain.
The company removed a major part of Hot Reload in the upcoming release of .NET 6 this week, a feature that allows developers to get instant feedback when creating a project and change code to see results instantly.
Hot Reload is an important point for the Dart programming language and rival Flutter toolkit from Google, which Microsoft has been playing a part in bringing to .NET and Visual Studio.
The company described its original plans as an ambitious project to bring Hot Reload to as many .NET developers as possible. But the change made it limited to Windows developers and Visual Studio instead of being open and available across multiple platforms.
The company tested a semi-final version of the release candidate .NET 6 that allowed developers to use Hot Reload across a variety of environments and platforms, including the popular Visual Studio Code development environment.
A release candidate generally means that the company considers it to be production ready and fully featured and that people should watch out for bugs before it is fully released.
But Change Announced earlier this week, it means the company is enabling Hot Reload functionality through Visual Studio 2022 only.
Read also: Microsoft establishes a special section for open source
Microsoft risks losing all its efforts
“We had to do this so we could focus on providing the best experiences for most users,” said Dmitriy Lialin, a program manager working on Hot Reload at Microsoft.
and sheds Theme Via GitHub questioning the removal highlights community frustration, along with Comments Via Hacker News and company blog.
Engineers at Microsoft who have worked on .NET for years with the open source community are alarmed and fear the decision will have lasting effects on the company’s open source efforts.
The decision also comes after weeks of turmoil in the .NET community over the company’s involvement in the .NET Foundation. The organization was created in 2014 when the company created open source .NET.
It is meant to be an independent organization that exists to improve open source software development and collaboration for .NET.
The latest controversy also led to the recent resignation of Claire Nowotny, CEO of the .NET Foundation. Others questioned the independence of the .NET organization due to Microsoft’s special privileges.
The company has spent the past 10 years embracing open source software, and at several points it has admitted its love for Linux and the open source community. The Linux Foundation also commended the company for its work with the open source community after the company joined the Foundation nearly five years ago.
Read also: Microsoft Joins The Linux Foundation With Platinum Membership
