Or should that have said Open source and I?

I was thinking about the whole open source thing and my role in it. It is true that use and abuse a fair number of open source projects and I blogged about a lot of them in the past. I have however never contributed to any of them in a big way. I might have sent a few request for improvement and sent a few bugreports. I even once wrote an automocker for NSubstitute for Structuremap which I don’t think ever made it in to the code. But I don’t think any of those things I did made much impact on those projects or on me. I even made an attempt at improving the proxy support for nuget but got fairly quickly frustrated with how things were done.

I don’t think I would ever make a good contributor to any open source project anyway since my time is limited and my attention span is even shorter.

Blogging on the other hand is something I like to do, I might not be that good at it but no one forced you to read this. And I think that by blogging about open source projects and telling people how to use them with VB.Net I am contributing a very small bit to the community. That and trying to keep this site running keep me busy for most of the time without being overly intrusive into my social activities.

I don’t know if my efforts are in any way appreciated by anyone but me. But that is enough I think.

I am always willing to test any .Net open source project with VB.Net because I know that the authors usually have no interest in doing so. Knowing that documentation is nearly always lacking that can be a challenge sometimes.

I also do not think that I would pick an open source project over another project just because of it’s open sourceness. It has to bring something to the table that is new or better than the other. Time is not plentiful for me so I try to spend it wisely.

So there now you know how incoherent my brain is. And a few of my stands on open source in the .Net community.