.NET OSS Projects When 'Free' Stops Working: Better to Re-license or Die?


.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

.NET users complaining about independent OSS to Microsoft

In this post we’re going to unpack two things:

  1. Impact of the FluentAssertions change and
  2. Broader questions about what .NET users would prefer: “re-license or die?

Click here to read the full article.

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Aaronontheweb

I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.

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