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?
.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.
Software 2.0: Code is Cheap, Good Taste is Not Last week I shipped a feature that would have taken me ~4 days in about 45 minutes: 8 parallel solutions explored, 1 verified, reviewed, deployed. That's not vibe coding. It's a process. I'm calling it Software 2.0. Software 1.0 is software you specify. Software 2.0 is software you verify. I just published a long essay formalizing how I've been using LLMs to ship production software - not as a novelty, but as a disciplined engineering process...
Why Your Software Sucks: Inheritance Published on January 26, 2026 in 7 minutes to read “I have a great idea: let’s create a five-layer deep inheritance hierarchy with a universal base class that every domain object inherits from! That way, when requirements inevitably change, we’ll only need to touch… everything.” This is episode two of my Why Your Software Sucks video series, and today we’re talking about inheritance - specifically, how deep inheritance hierarchies turn your codebase into...
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...