Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You are unaware of how much better it is with the other ecosystems. Probably all of them except the ones controlled by Apple, Oracle and IBM.

You want to know what's better than having actual MS developers interact with your issue on GH? Being able to submit a MR yourself and actually have that MR be merged in within days of it being good to go.

That's not just a dream, that's the standard way of operating for most large open source ecosystems. If you solve a known issue with a clear well considered merge request, and you've gone through all the prescribed steps your MR will get merged.

From personal experience I've landed MR's in the Ruby interpreter, in the Rust compiler and in the Rails framework. All as a complete outsider with no prior introductions to the team. Just be polite, follow the rules, solve something that's real with no architectural impact and it'll get merged (just mentioning these because they're ecosystems, I've had MR's merged in for dozens of smaller projects in the same manner).

You can do this in the .NET ecosystem too, they accept pull requests from the community regularly. I have a few merged PRs in Roslyn, one in particular I made because I knew it didn't affect very many developers and would have trouble getting prioritized.

Also personally the ideal situation for me is for someone who is getting paid to fix the issue to go fix it without me having to get my hands dirty.

I had the same experience, submitted a PR to Roslyn, was asked to add some additional unit tests, and was merged within days.

Bonus points if you're either not asked to transfer your copyright, or asked to transfer it to a non-profit foundation.

Personally, I'm ok with doing the work myself if I didn't pay for the product. It gives me a feeling we're all working together on a better software ecosystem, because Turing knows we need it to be better sometimes.

edit: sorry for moving the goal posts, it's definitely cool that you got MR's into Roslyn, it's an awesome project.

I work on an open-source project for Microsoft, and I review and merge community PRs all the time. Nobody pays for the product I work on (or for C# or TypeScript, for that matter).

The Contributor License Agreement used on all MSFT open source projects doesn't ask you to transfer your copyright, though it does require submitters to agree to grant a permissive copyright and patent license. IANAL, but the copyright and patent clauses in Microsoft's CLA[0] do not look substantially different from the equivalent clauses in the Apache 2.0 license[1].

[0]: https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-...

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/LICENSE-APACHE...

It's a stretch to say that nobody pays for C#. A commercial Visual Studio license sure isn't free, and depending on what you're making you're at a big disadvantage without one.

Right, you're not paying for C# you're paying for an IDE. You don't need VS to use C#. Especially now with Roslyn a the c# language server a lot of other IDEs can do a lot of the same things VS can do.

And if you're working on open source/non-commercially, the free community edition is also a good option.

Indie devs and small businesses (<5 installs) can use the community edition for commercial purposes, too. I use VS Code & the C# extension most of the time, and that's free as in beer for use by anybody.

The same way that js isn't free because you need webstorm or an aws account to deploy a node app? That argument is a stretch too.

.NET PRs sit unmerged for years if they're not a priority for MSFT. I'm glad it works well sometimes and that MSFT seems to care about .NET on Linux, but it's not that open.

Point out a major language that doesn't have a graveyard of PR's with similar stories.

The important distinction is that the PR graveyard of other projects isn't determined by MSFT's corporate priorities.

Every major open source project is in no small way driven by the interests of corporate users, from which a non-trivial number of PR's and contributions come from. This is true from Linux and Postgres to Rust and Java.

Of course Microsoft only include functionality they want. Just like any other platform only include what they want. It is entirely their prerogative. Just because they don't include anything and everything other people want, it does not make them less open source.

We are entirely free to fork the project, embed the change and compile our own binaries. You don't have to strongarm a change into upstream for that.

Any non-trivial OSS project has corporate sponsors on the steering committee and feature set/fixes are mostly driven by these corporate sponsors. So in the end it's all same.

That other languages may or may not be as bad as .NET does not make .NET any more or less bad.

I ran open-source teams for Microsoft for a number of years, all through GitHub. We had contribution policies, encouraged PRs, and would bend-over-backwards for external developers contributing code.

It's not an exaggeration, but I don't know how it could be better done.

I have a problem with that. You have essentially done work for multi-billion corporation without remuneration. That would probably violate many laws like minimum wage requirement and volunteering at for profit corporation (minimum wage must be paid). I wonder why this is not pursued.

Nearly everything that is open-source depends on people doing work for free that is used by other people who use it for profit. Maybe OP is making profit through the software they're writing using C#. Should Microsoft charge them for C# usage? Microsoft is the ones paying for development costs after all.

The purpose of open-source software is to be able to fix problems for your use case and continue using the improved software. OP could have just chosen not to upstream their changes (I'm assuming you'd be okay with that since Microsoft doesn't get their hand on the fix) but then they wouldn't be able to easily update their compiler.

I guess the only real option here is to use a community-developed language with no for-profit company behind it. Then write all the libraries that Microsoft wrote for C# and published for _free_. Hmm.

I wonder what percentage of popular languages / libraries out there have the level of reliability & support that C# and other open-source software with big corps behind them has.

But this way you are promoting inequality. Being able to commit substantial amount of time to volunteer without remuneration is a domain of privileged people, usually from wealthy white background. They can they use their contributions as highlights in their CVs and for instance get better jobs than people who were not in a position to give their time for free. Hencewhy in many countries, like mine, things like internships have to be paid. If they weren't then positions were mostly filled with youth from wealthy families.

If Microsoft was honest about equality and open source, they would have donated the whole platform to a non-profit foundation and removed its name from it.

> "You want to know what's better than having actual MS developers interact with your issue on GH? Being able to submit a MR yourself and actually have that MR be merged in within days of it being good to go."

.NET isn't your average hobby project - it's used everywhere. It's imperative that changes go through the proper due process here. It takes time to prepare design documents and review them, discuss the changes and different alternatives, review the code, implement the changes and test them properly.

If that's somehow a problem to you, I think your expectations need to be readjusted. This is not the kind of project that should hastily accept code.

It's not used everywhere, or not to a significant degree different to how Ruby is, which was in the example of the post you were replying to. And this isn't about haste, it's about openness. Code that is well written and passes tests can be reviewed and merged in hours, let alone days, without being considered hastily included.

This is an absurd straw-man. Nowhere did the parent comment say anything of the kind you're arguing against. In fact, they highlighted that you should the follow the procedures and rules. This is silly.

The parent said within a few days. That might not be realistic with the processes in place and I think that's all they were getting at.

I'd be very surprised if Microsoft's development process is more thorough than that of Rust or even Rails. These are not your average hobby projects, it is imperative that changes go through the proper due process there. It takes time to prepare design documents and review them, discuss the changes and different alternatives, review the code, implement the changes, test them properly, and you can participate in all those steps.

Having submitted a somewhat trivial PR (System.HashCode), they really put you through the ringer. It took almost 3 weeks of constant (and valuable) feedback for the PR to move into a state that they liked.

All of this about dotnet not accepting PRs is unadulterated "Micro$uck FUD". The other critiques are valid, but not this one, not by a mile, it is complete bullshit.

The guy's got code into Ruby, rustc, and Rails. I'm pretty sure he knows what it takes to get things into master at a widely used project.

Just so no one's deterred, it's actually not very difficult to do this. The rustc and ruby patches I submitted as an exercise. I went to the issue tracker, sorted by oldest first, and then picked the first issue that had little/no discussion on it. I purposefully avoided picking an issue with significant architectural impact or political context this way.

So there's also not much designing and reviewing needed. The merge requests were assigned to very senior reviewers each time. The automated test suites made sure I didn't waste much of anyone's time with trivial errors. Of course the requirement is that you're actually at least proficient with the languages (C for Ruby and Rust for rustc) but beyond that I think anyone can do it with a couple of sunday afternoons spent diligently digging through the codebase.

Ruby and Rust and Rails aren't exactly hobby projects either. Mission critical software exists that uses those as well. Ultimately it's on the development and deployment teams to pin a version of the runtime for actual consistency in environment.

> Being able to submit a MR yourself and actually have that MR be merged in within days of it being good to go.

And? The vast majority of the .NET ecosystem operates this way, and discounting that because MS still has proprietary closed-source projects is disingenuous.

You mean the ones where the JIT and AOT compilers, GC algorithms, GUI frameworks, and the IDE toolings are poor examples of the ones controlled by Google (forgot this one), Apple, Oracle and IBM?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com