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by paxcoder 212 days ago
I can confirm that (several years ago at least) free PDF libraries were lacking, and Telerik was always non-free.

However, aren't Moq, Avalonia and MassTransit free software?

As for Automapper and MediatR, their owner changed from a free software license to only an open source one (Reciprocal Public License), but these are probably the simplest libraries of the ones you mentioned and have either been forked (MagicMapper) or have alternatives.
1 comments
whizzter 212 days ago
Yeah pdf libraries are a bit of a mess, I work with a product that handles lots of PDF documents and I think we just recently added another PDF library dependency (I'm certain it's at least 3 now, but could be 4 or even 5 libraries loaded at startup).

Moq has the appearance of free software but bundled some spyware stuff (seemingly "benign" "Sponsorlink" for getting donations).

Masstransit went commercial recently, https://masstransit.io/introduction/v9-announcement

Avalonia itself is opensource, but i'd put in in a fremium/shareware category since if you need to add an WebView or Media player you need to buy their commercial Accelarate additions.

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to11mtm 211 days ago
> Moq has the appearance of free software but bundled some spyware stuff (seemingly "benign" "Sponsorlink" for getting donations).

Well they pulled back but the trust was broken in a lot of cases. I am still fine with it 'for now' but IDK NSubstitute always feels weird to me, maybe that's just how I was taught to use it tho.

> Masstransit went commercial recently

I mean good for them but thankfully it's also giving attention to other projects that are FOSS or Open Core...

As far as the other stuff, I've never seen AutoMapper used in a way that couldn't literally be handled with a static/extension method in 'real' code. Yes it can be useful but it is often grossly overused.

MediatR is cool but TBH I'd rather just reach for Akka.NET or MessagePipe instead; If you're abstracting out to keep processing backend 'swappable' you should be able to handle any of the above for the choice you make anyway.

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whizzter 211 days ago
I created a Moq lookalike in an evening a few months back, it's not a hugely advanced project honestly (if you're used to working with the reflection system).
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