The title might seem to be inflammatory, but it\'s here to catch your eye after

Question

The title might seem to be inflammatory, but it's here to catch your eye after all.

I'm a professional .NET developer, but I try to follow other platforms as well. With Ruby being all hyped up (mostly due to Rails, I guess) I cannot help but compare the situation in open-source projects in Ruby and .NET.

What I personally find interesting is that .NET developers are for the most part severely suffering from the NIH syndrome and are very hesitant to use someone else's code in pretty much any shape or form. Comparing it with Ruby, I see a striking difference. Folks out there have gems literally for every little piece of functionality imaginable. New projects are popping out left and right and generally are heartily welcomed.

On the .NET side we have CodePlex which I personally find to be a place where abandoned projects grow old and eventually get abandoned. Now, there certainly are several well-known and maintained projects, but the number of those pales in comparison with that of Ruby.

Granted, NIH on the .NET devs part comes mostly from the fact that there are very few quality .NET projects out there, let alone projects that solve their specific needs, but even if there is such a project, it's often frowned upon and is reinvented in-house.

So my question is multi-fold:

Do you find my observations anywhere near being correct?
If so, what are your thoughts on quality and quantitiy of OSS projects in .NET?
Again, if you do agree with my thoughts on "NIH in .NET", what do you think is causing it?
And finally, is it Ruby's feature set & community standpoint (dynamic language, strong focus on testing) that allows for such easy integration of third-party code?

Explanation / Answer

Yes, certainly. What I've actually found in 6+ years as a .NET developer is, plainly, this: Most .NET developers are ignorant of anything that doesn't come with Visual Studio. There are exceptions, of course, and close-knit communities of .NET developers that do amazing things and embrace open source and non-Microsoft offerings, but by and large .NET guys don't know anything outside of Microsoft and that's partially why they suffer from NIH - need an ORM (in the days before Linq/EF caught on)? Write one yourself, because open source is not supported so can't be trusted. Need a library to frobnicate widgets? We have "unique needs" (not really) so we can't use an open-source or OTS solution, have to write our own. Hell most .NET guys I've worked with in six years barely understood design patterns or OOP, let alone how to leverage open source projects properly.

I don't know what it is about the Ruby community, but the culture there is like night and day compared to .NET's typical ecosystem. Most open-source languages have that culture while .NET has a more narrow-minded culture.

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