The.NET Foundation is an organization incorporated on March 31, 2014,[1] byMicrosoft to improveopen-source software development and collaboration around the.NET Framework.[4] It was launched at the annualBuild 2014 conference held by Microsoft.[5] The foundation is license-agnostic, and projects that come to the foundation are free to choose anyopen-source license, as defined by theOpen Source Initiative (OSI).[6] The foundation usesGitHub 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 theASP.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 andWorldWide Telescope. Many of these projects are also listed underOutercurve Foundation project galleries.
As of June 2024[update], itsboard of directors consisted of Louëlla Creemers, Mitchel Sellers, Kendall Miller, Chris Woodruff, Glenn Watson, Kevin Griffin and Chris Sfanos.[10]
