.NET Foundation

.NET Foundation
FoundedMarch 31, 2014; 10 years ago (2014-03-31)[1]
FounderMicrosoft
47-2119192[2]
Legal status501(c)(6) organization
HeadquartersRedmond, Washington, U.S.[2]
Tom Pappas[3]
Websitedotnetfoundation.org Edit this at Wikidata

The .NET Foundation is an organization incorporated on March 31, 2014,[1] by Microsoft to improve open-source software development and collaboration around the .NET Framework.[4] It was launched at the annual Build 2014 conference held by Microsoft.[5] The foundation is license-agnostic, and projects that come to the foundation are free to choose any open-source license, as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).[6] The foundation uses GitHub to host the open-source projects it manages.[7]

Anyone who has contributed to .NET Foundation projects can apply to be a .NET Foundation member. Members can vote in elections for the board of the directors and will preserve the health of the organization.[8]

The foundation began with twenty-four projects under its stewardship including .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") and the ASP.NET family of open-source projects, both open-sourced by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech).[5] Xamarin contributed six of its projects including the open source email libraries MimeKit and MailKit.[5] As of May 2020, it is the steward of 556 active projects,[9] including: .NET, Entity Framework (EF), Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), MSBuild, NuGet, Orchard CMS and WorldWide Telescope. Many of these projects are also listed under Outercurve Foundation project galleries.

As of June 2024, its board of directors consisted of Louëlla Creemers, Mitchel Sellers, Kendall Miller, Chris Woodruff, Glenn Watson, Kevin Griffin and Chris Sfanos.[10]

  1. ^ a b ".NET Foundation". Registration Data Search. Corporations Division. Washington State Secretary of State. Accessed on March 30, 2016.
  2. ^ a b "NET Foundation". Guidestar. Accessed on March 30, 2016.
  3. ^ "Board of Directors and Administrative Team".
  4. ^ Lardinois, Frederic (April 3, 2014). "Microsoft Launches .NET Foundation To Foster The .NET Open Source Ecosystem". TechCrunch.
  5. ^ a b c Paoli, Jean (April 3, 2014). ".NET Foundation Established to Foster Open Development". MS Open Tech. Archived from the original on May 21, 2015. Retrieved May 21, 2015.
  6. ^ "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)". .NET Foundation. Archived from the original on May 14, 2016. Retrieved May 21, 2015.
  7. ^ ".NET Foundation". GitHub.
  8. ^ ".NET Foundation Membership". dotnetfoundation.org. Retrieved November 18, 2022.
  9. ^ ".NET Foundation". dotnetfoundation.org. Archived from the original on May 9, 2020.
  10. ^ ".NET Foundation Board of Directors". .NET Foundation. Archived from the original on September 12, 2024. Retrieved September 26, 2021.