 | |
| Founded | March 31, 2014[1] |
|---|---|
| Founder | Microsoft |
| 47-2119192[2] | |
| Legal status | 501(c)(6) organization |
| Headquarters | Redmond, Washington, U.S.[2] |
| Tom Pappas[3] | |
| Website | dotnetfoundation |
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[update], 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 2022[update], its board of directors consisted of Bill Wagner, Javier Lozano, Rich Lander, Frank Odoom, Mattias Karlsson, Rob Prouse and Shawn Wildermuth.[10]
