So it's maintained in the open on GitHub, it's technically open source in terms of licensing. Yet you claim it's not really open source. Care to clarify?
It’s technically open-source, that’s the point. There’s more to open-source than license. Sorry but there’s no way for me to clarify without just repeating my original comment.
> It’s technically open-source, that’s the point. There’s more to open-source than license. Sorry but there’s no way for me to clarify without just repeating my original comment.
It's free software, and in that sense the license is the only thing that really matters. However, if you're discussing open collaboration styles then that's a whole different discussion. Either your project is free software or it isn't. Whether it has a diverse and open development community is a separate problem, and doesn't fall under "is this project [free software]".
Such as? You seem to have a mental model of things that make a project objectively open source, that don't include the license. I'd be curious what those things are.
I really don’t, it’s more of a feeling. With an open-source release like .NET it seems more like better documentation. In fact that was the case for early commercial Unixes—you needed the source code to actually use the system, but it wasn’t open-source.
Open-source as-documentation (for lack of better term) is still useful. It makes bug fixing a whole lot easier, for one thing. But it’s not quite the same as open-source ecosystem. For that you need to have a diverse set of actors, sharing the same goal. That’s what I think successful open-source project makes. You need to accept the fact that the project is not just yours. Something like that.
Of course Microsoft could do all those things. Who knows, it they’re determined enough they might turn it around. The problem here is like I said Java is just good enough. No one really cares, except people that could use some better documentation, that have been already invested in the ecosystem. That’s why open-sourcing is still valuable, but also why they’ll never gain any adoption of the kind they’d need.
Sorry if that sounds like rambling, it’s sort of late.