Microsoft’s .NET open source translation brought tangible benefits

In recent years, Microsoft has been trying to become a more developer-friendly company and actively participates in the open source community. Today, Microsoft has one of the largest repositories on GitHub , dedicated to the development of free software. In addition, some proprietary products of the company are transferred to the status of open source software.

One of the successes of the technology giant in this area is the translation of .NET into the status of an open source product with the publication of the source code on GitHub. It happened back in November 2014 - more than two years ago - and today we can state with confidence that this step of the company brought her more benefit than harm.

In the face of fierce competition for the attention of developers, classically closed from outsiders by Microsoft, she took an unusual step, but undoubtedly benefited from it. ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core environment, the framework itself and libraries were laid out in open access. Thus, the company allowed working with .NET developers on Mac and Linux.

According to statistics from the mattwarren.org blog , since the publication of .NET sources on Github, the number of active developers for VS 2012+ has increased by 61%:
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In addition, the community is actively involved in developing with Microsoft:



The number of pull requests from the community is not so impressive, but the fact that the share of the community accounts for, on average, 20-40% of activity, indicates the interest of developers to the company's section:



"Forty percent of .NET Core users are new developers," says Scott Hunter, the director of the .NET division of Microsoft. "We want to attract new people."

Is the experience of interacting with the open source community positive for Microsoft? Of course. Indirectly, this is evidenced by the recent release of the Visual Studio for Mac preview , which the company made in November of this year.

Scott Hunter claims that this will be the first case of porting the company's IDE to a platform other than Windows. At the same time, the Visual Studio 2017 IDE being developed includes simplifying the syntax for working with open source projects on .NET Core, that is, the company is heading for bringing together as many of its products as possible with the Open source community and, accordingly, maximizing the audience.