I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.
.NET OSS Projects When 'Free' Stops Working: Better to Re-license or Die?
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.NET OSS Projects: Better to Re-license or Die?Published on January 18, 2025 in .NET / Open Source This week FluentAssertions, a popular open source library designed to make it easier to write assertions during unit testing, changed its license from Apache 2.0 to some commercial terms under the name of a new business entity, Xceed. The net impact of this is that FluentAssertions now costs $129.95 per seat for commercial use for version 8.0 and later. Naturally the .NET community was in uproar over this on /r/dotnet and in a few other places, like this comment from the “.NET Eventing Framework” thread which inspired “.NET Developers Begging for Ecosystem Destruction”
In this post we’re going to unpack two things:
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Aaronontheweb
I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.
Why Am I Paying $40,000 for the Birth of My Child? Published on November 30, 2025 My third child arrives in a week. The cost? $40,000. Out of pocket. Cash. Not because something went wrong medically. That's just the price of admission for a self-employed entrepreneur who wants to grow a family while running a small business in America. $25,680 in annual premiums + $14,300 deductible = the privilege of bringing a new taxpayer into this world. I wrote about this because Michael Green's viral...
Stop Failing The `git clone && run` Test Published on October 17, 2025 in 10 minutes to read I’ve done a ton of consulting as part of my work at Petabridge over the past 10 years and I run into developer onboarding problems constantly with new clients. It takes much longer than it should to clone a customer’s application from source control and successfully run it. Continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD) get a ton of attention in the DevOps space, but improving the “first...
Your HTML Comments Are More Powerful Than You Think: Building Custom Validation Grammars with HtmlAgilityPack Published on October 1, 2025 in 20 minutes to read We were getting ready to redesign and simplify phobos.petabridge.com - our Akka.NET observability platform documentation site. The plan was to remove a bunch of old pages, restructure the information architecture, and redirect everything properly so we wouldn’t break any inbound links from Google, Stack Overflow, or the blog posts...