It’s a Thursday, which means: .NET open source drama.

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In my last post I went into detail on maintaining API, binary, and wire compatibility for open source projects and why that’s a nececssary ingredient for building professional-grade open source, the type that can be successfully morphed into a sustainable project should the authors pursue that outcome.

In this post I want to cover a subtle issue that you will inevitably run into as soon as you start having to worry about breaking changes for your users: semantic versioning (SemVer) and how strictly you should follow it.

My opinion, with which technical purists will likely find fault, is that strict SemVer is hilariously impractical and projects that follow it blindly actually subvert their own goal of building trust in their project. Read on.

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We’re in the process of defining some community standards for Akka.NET, part of which is expanding and modernizing our contributor guidelines to help users answer the question “how do I know if my pull request will be merged?” before having to ask anyone on the development team.

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We launched Sdkbin, our NuGet meets App Store marketplace for .NET developers on September 30th 2020, but with an important limitation: that Petabridge would be the only publisher on the marketplace until we had a chance to eat our own dogfood and work out functionality / user experience / business process issues with our customers first.

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On Tuesday, January 5th 2021 my grandfather, James Chester Roush, passed away in his retirement community in San Diego, California, peacefully in his sleep. He was 96 years old. He was a World War II veteran, serving as a navigator-bombardier for the US Army Air Corps on a B-26 Martin Marauder stationed out of Sardinia and later, Dijon France.

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I’ve written before about how to start contributing to OSS and I wrote for the Petabridge blog about “How to Use Github Professionally” - both of those posts were aimed at helping developers who had experience working in private software organizations bring their experience and passion into open source software and more specifically, how to use Github as a platform to do that effectively.

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Periodically I receive inquiries from people in the startup community who are exploring an idea or want an estimate on how expensive this particular idea may be to implement - as is common in the entrepreneurial community I’m happy to pay it forward (because I received help like this when I was just getting started too) and review a pitch deck, specification, or business plan and offer my advice if the person is someone I’ve interacted with online, in-person, or is referred through someone else I know.

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I’ve written several posts recently about creating sustainable open source projects by treating them like proper businesses - my journey for the past 5-6 years since founding Petabridge has been a quest to find a way to create sustainable, profitable business models built on top of the open source software I’ve spent the last 6-7 years developing.

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Here we go again. “The Day AppGet Died” - the short version: OSS developer fills a hole in the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft offers him a job to work on this kind of product inside the company, ghosts him, releases their competing product which appears to have borrowed heavily from his designs, doesn’t attribute original developer’s work, Internet gets mad, Microsoft gives a non-apology apology, and maybe some kind of resolution.

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In my last post about “The Next Decade of .NET Open Source” I alluded to a future blog post about open source sustainability. This is it.

Some background: in January 2015, fresh off of the very public failure...

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