The .NET Foundation is an organization incorporated on March 31, 2014,
[ by ]Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
to improve open-source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. ...
development and collaboration around the .NET Framework. It was launched at the annual Build 2014 conference held by Microsoft. The foundation is license-agnostic, and projects that come to the foundation are free to choose any open-source license
An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial compan ...
, as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The foundation uses GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...
to host the open-source projects it manages.
Anyone who has contributed to .NET Foundation projects can apply to be a .NET Foundation member. Members can vote in elections for the board of the directors and will preserve the health of the organization.
The foundation began with twenty-four projects under its stewardship including .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") and the ASP.NET family of open-source projects, both open-sourced by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech). Xamarin
Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android) and Xamarin.iOS (formerly MonoTouch), which are cross-platform implementatio ...
contributed six of its projects including the open source email libraries MimeKit and MailKit. , it is the steward of 556 active projects, including: .NET, Entity Framework (EF), Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), MSBuild, NuGet, Orchard CMS and WorldWide Telescope. Many of these projects are also listed under Outercurve Foundation project galleries.
, its board of directors
A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit orga ...
consisted of Bill Wagner, Javier Lozano, Rich Lander, Frank Odoom, Mattias Karlsson, Rob Prouse and Shawn Wildermuth.
See also
* Free software movement
* ASP.NET AJAX
* ASP.NET MVC
* SignalR
* .NET Micro Framework
References
External links
*
{{.NET Framework
501(c)(6) nonprofit organizations
Free software project foundations in the United States
Microsoft
Organizations established in 2014