by Miguel de Icaza

.NET Foundation Changes

Today we announced a major change to the .NET Foundation, in which we fundamentally changed the way that the foundation operates. The new foundation draws inspiration from the Gnome Foundation and the F# Foundation.

We are making the following changes:

  • The Board of Directors of the Foundation will now be elected by the .NET Foundation membership, and they will be in charge of steering the direction of the foundation. The Board of Directors will be elected annually via direct vote from the members of the Foundation, with just one permanent member from Microsoft.

  • Anyone contributing to projects in the .NET Foundation can become a voting member of the Foundation. The main benefit is that you get to vote for who should represent you in the board of directors. To become a member, we will judge contributions to the projects in the foundation, which can either be code contributions, documentation, evangelism or other activities that advance .NET and its ecosystem.

  • Membership fee: we are adding a membership fee that will give the .NET Foundation independence from Microsoft when it comes to how it chooses to promote .NET and the ecosystem around it. We realize that not everyone can pay this fee, so this fee can be waived. But those that contribute to the Foundation will help us fund activities that will expand .NET.

  • We intend to have elections every year, so individuals will campaign on what they intend to bring to the board.

  • There is a limit in the number of members on the board representing a single company, which prevents the board from being stacked up by contributors for a single company, and will encourage our community to vote for board members with diverse backgrounds, strengthening the views of the board.

  • Companies do not vote. The only way to vote is for contributors to the .NET ecosystem, which could be affiliated with a company to vote, but the companies themselves have no vote. Our corporate sponsors are sponsors that care as much as we care as the growth and health of our ecosystem.

These changes are very close to my heart and took a lot of work to make them happen and make sure that Microsoft the company was comfortable with giving up the control over the .NET Foundation.

I want to thank Jon Galloway, the Executive Director of the current .NET Foundation to help make this a reality.

Going from the idea to the execution took a long time. Martin Woodward did some of the early foot work to get various people at Microsoft comfortable with the idea. Then Jon took over, and had to continue this process to get everyone on board and get everyone to accept that our little baby was ready to graduate, go to college and start its own independent life.

I want to thank my peers in the board of directors that supported this move, Scott Hunter, Oren Novotny, Rachel Reese as well as the entire supporting crew that helped us make this happen, Beth Massi, Jay Schmelzer and the various heroes in the Microsoft legal department that crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s.

See you on the campaign trail!

Posted on 04 Dec 2018