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.
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...
There Has Never Been a Better Time to be a Junior Developer - And It Won't Last Forever Published on August 22, 2025 in 11 minutes to read Everyone in tech is convinced that AI will eliminate junior developers first. “Why hire a junior when AI can write code?” they ask. The prevailing wisdom is that entry-level developers are most vulnerable to automation. They’re dead wrong. I wrote “The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste” a few months back and that’s still...