01 November 2016

This (somewhat morbid) question comes up (in various forms) from time to time. And, as you might imagine given my health issues over the past few years, I put very real thought into this whole concept. Three different times it was quite possible that I wouldn’t make it.

The concern though, is the same with Angular, Java, Spring, or any other open source framework or tool. It is also the same with any commercial tool – anyone who’s been in this business for a while has surely dealt with commercial vendors going under, leaving them stranded with a component or technology that’s no longer supported.

In the commercial space the biggest offset to this is code escrow. In the OSS space the code is open, so it is “automatically” escrowed.

In the commercial space there’s really nothing beyond escrow either. You can’t bind a company to provide you support once they are gone. But in the OSS world things rest on community, so at least there’s some hope past escrow.

CSLA .NET has a broad community of contributors. There’s a site out there that collects metadata around OSS projects, including CSLA: https://www.openhub.net/p/cslanet

There’s a core leadership team for CSLA, including myself, Jonny Bekkum, Jason Bock, and Kevin Ford. So some Magenic, some non-Magenic. The framework is copyrighted (owned) by an independent LLC (that I own, but still, it is an entity that will outlive me).

Any platform, framework, or tool you use to build software deserves no more or less scrutiny than CSLA. People might dismiss ASP.NET because (a) it is OSS, or (b) because Microsoft owns the copyright. But Microsoft has abandoned technologies before (some quite recently: LightSwitch? Silverlight?). Were Microsoft to abandon ASP.NET, or perhaps Microsoft goes out of business (like DEC did in the 1990’s: they were the #2 computer maker one year, basically non-existent three years later), what would happen to ASP.NET? Well, it is OSS, so the community would hopefully pick it up.

Same thing with CSLA .NET.