I’ve been working a lot with Sam Ramji (Microsoft), Phil Haack, Jon Galloway, and Scott Hanselman over the last few months on various ways that, together with Microsoft, we can help expand the Open Source landscape for .NET. Lots of ideas are on the table and one of them in particular seemed to be a pretty good one: An Open Source Incubator and so we thought we would run with it, to see how receptive the .NET developer world is to Open Source in general.

The idea here is that ideas for Open Source projects are spun up (either through suggestions or circumstance) and a group of Alpha Geeks gets together to help scope and form the initial architecture of the project. Then that project is handed off to a willing soul who would like to own it and run with it.

As a show of support, Sam has agreed to offer 1-2 MSDN licenses to support the ongoing development of the project, and we’ll do the best we can to help get a community going for you.

Why Would I Want To Do This?
It’s not easy running an Open Source project, for sure. However the upsides are pretty good:

1. You get to work with some top-flight people who will want to contribute to your project
2. You will be able to help the whole Open Source thing, which in turn helps out the whole community
3. It’s your chance to finally do things your way instead of wondering why things are done the *other* way

This is hopefully just the start of a bigger initiative between the OS community and Microsoft. Sam’s position at Microsoft is all about fostering this kind of growth, and this is one way to get them to to do more the OS way! But we want to sort of “beta” the idea… and this is that chance .

The First Project
So I volunteered to toss the first project into the ring (and with it, 2 MSDN licenses): The SubSonic Forums App. I’ve been working up this application for the Green Screen challenge, the idea here is to create a light-weight, pluggable forums “sub application” that people can drop into their web sites. I have some interesting ideas for it that I’ll share with you – and if you’re into it we can go over it and then it’s all yours once the video series is finished!

Ideally we’d like to see a person who:

• Likes to blog
• Is a community-type who knows their way around a forum
• Has some good experience with .NET
• Has the time to commit to running an Open Source project (a couple hours a week-ish)

If you’re up for this, send me your email (robconery at gmail) along with whatever information you’d like to share with us and we’ll look it over.

I’m really hoping we can make something of this, and if you have any ideas – we’d love to hear em!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.