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Founded | March 31, 2014 [1] |
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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 2024 [update] , its board of directors consisted of Louëlla Creemers, Mitchel Sellers, Kendall Miller, Chris Woodruff, Glenn Watson, Kevin Griffin and Chris Sfanos. [10]