Manifest for .NETMF (the current state and the future we want for it)

[josesimoes]

This is the result of an ongoing reflection with a bunch of .NETMF friends/supporters/users that's been happening in the past weeks.
Understand that we are doing this with a positive and constructive attitude. We are not grumping or saying it just because we want to criticize.

Considerations and the current state:

• NETMF is a truly awesome framework with an incredible potential for commercial, hobbyist and learning scenarios.
• Microsoft (for reasons that are not perfectly clear or made public) hasn’t be showing any love for this project for quite some time.
• The move to GitHub was supposed to improve the community engagement and make the workflow easier. After more than one year none of that has become a reality.
• Right now, as someone nicely put it, NETMF is going through an Ice Age. It sure looks like a zombie project, wandering and headed to nowhere.
• NETMF announces itself as an "Open Source" project. Considering all the implications and ramifications that designation carries, this is not the reality we can see today.
• There are a lot of smart, valuable and knowledgeable people out there who are willing to contribute. Those should be encouraged to do so and brought on board.

What should change:

• NETMF should become a true "Open Source" project. Steered by the community involved and managed by a team of people.
• There should be a full team behind it. With roles assigned, clear tasks defined and expectations set.
• A roadmap should exist. The community must have a saying on the direction of the project, what features are required, what needs to be changed or improved.
• Issues should be answered and handled in a timely and respectful fashion. Pull requests should be encouraged and evaluated with a positive and constructive attitude. Contributions should be encouraged and cherished.
• Microsoft (probably through the .NET Foundation) should be asked for their open support. Institutional support, that's for sure. But not only. Ideally they should be asked to contribute by marketing NETMF, making noise about it, mention it in Channel 9, Twitter, blogs and such. It wouldn’t hurt to commit a few more people to the project.
• NETMF should be brought under the spot light, front and centre. Needs to be shown and be seen by makers, schools, universities and companies. Needs to be mentioned in the social networks. Needs to show that it's alive and has potential. A lot of potential!

[piwi1263]

If you're looking or in need of votes, you've got mine !!!

[Stabilitronas]

In my opinion, NETMF repo first has to build. If I pull it and it doesn't build right away, than I doubt it will ever become a true community project. Using outrageously expensive Keil compilers is not going to work — average Joes won't buy it. Using outrageously expensive Keil devboards is not going to work — average Joes won't buy them too. If it takes 7 days of reading manuals to simply build it, then it's too not going to work.

I'd like to contribute very much, but entering costs are just too high for me. At the moment, NETMF codebase is hugely overcomplicated and overpriced.

Until that changes, we're not going anywhere.

[cw2]

@Stabilitronas While you are right about Keil, you are not entirely fair: the majority (grin) of supported boards are affordable (Discovery and Nucleo) and they can be build with GCC using a single line command. (I personally know people who have spent a lot of their resources to make it happen :) )

True, the codebase is horrible, like any other project of comparable history. Hopefully, it is going to change dramatically in the upcoming vNext...

[Stabilitronas]

@cw2 I'm well aware of what you've done. But on a global scope, your GCC port still feels like some dude's side project. I'd like to see it going mainstream. Keil name should either go away completely (preferred by me), or at, at least, only maintained by those contributors, who want to save every bit of flash space, and not vice versa. I guess only business contributors, like GHI, would be interested in reducing image footprint, as that directly converts to $. For average NETMF Joe, it is totally irrelevant.

[piwi1263]

@Stabilitronas well, than go and assist/help and get that gcc port up, running and ready for a mainstream adventure. All the NetMf Joes, including myself, will thank you for that. Be constructive, address the week spots and/or missing parts.

[cw2]

@Stabilitronas Ok, touché.

[smaillet-ms]

Thanks to all for all the feedback here in this topic and in other discussions. It has all helped inform thinking about the future of NETMF (including that it should still have a future!).

There seams to be some confusion here on the nature of the project, @josesimoes says NETMF should become a true OSS, but then asks for Microsoft to, essentially treat it as a product. NOTE: I'm not trying to pick on @josesimoes here - this is a common point of conflict/confusion with many OSS projects from Microsoft. Hopefully I won't scare or offend anyone by being blunt on this in an attempt to establish clarity: .NET Micro Framework isn't really a Microsoft "product", and hasn't been one for many years now. It had a short life as a product in and of itself but, for a number of reasons, including a major world wide recession, that didn't continue. That said, Microsoft has in the past, and may in the future have projects that want to use .NET Micro Framework in them in some capacity and if that happens additional development effort and contributions from Microsoft will likely also occur. This is the same as with any other company that wants to use NETMF. The difficulty here is that even those of us who were once paid to work on NETMF and our users continue to think about it as a Microsoft "product". The troubles and frustrations that are observable now are, I believe, a result of everyone on all sides finally realizing that's not the case and having to deal with a change. Something we mere humans aren't particularly fond of 😉

In my observations, beyond just the recognition of change, a significant part of why we don't have a more broad "team" is that, historically, the bulk of community efforts have been focused on porting and adding additional .NET libraries rather than on the developing the core of the runtime. This is in part due to the fact that so far Microsoft has been the primary driver of the core and I'd say more significantly, is the fact that the core is so - how shall I say... "under documented" 😉

All of this feedback is the primary reason why the vNext branch is starting with nothing but docs. The documentation needs to layout how the core of the runtime works so that meaningful contributions can occur. For future capabilities everything will be written up as docs first so they can be discussed and reviewed before code is committed or PRs appear. We need to have clear guidelines on what sorts of changes are "in-scope" for the core product and those that aren't (i.e. changes to the runtime that effectively lock it to a particular SoC, or architecture would be a non-starter).

As the new branch begins to fill up we'll begin to establish new subject matter experts to fill up a team as @josesimoes requests. ( Side Note: the official GitHub team is much larger than the two people you currently see, however GitHub requires the individual to opt-in to visibility at the project level so they aren't all visible. They are also not all active so that will need to be addressed going forward as well ). I've been exploring some options on how we can manage some of this and when I have some more details I can share I will. (There are lots of legal weeny type issues to iron out) Ultimately, the reality is that I, as an individual, can't scale big enough and we will need additional subject matter experts to take on roles of reviewing and processing PRs, bugs and feature requests, etc... in various areas.

@Stabilitronas Yes, the reference MCBSTM32F400 is an expensive board. It was, chosen deliberately because it had full support from ARM/Keil, because it had "everything including the kitchen sink", and probably most importantly at the time, our port to it wouldn't be seen as a competition with commercial partners and more of an aid as it used an SOC that was effectively a superset of the most commonly used SoC in NETMF commercial boards. The plethora of low cost micro controller dev boards has grown to a point where I'm no longer convinced that last point is relevant. I've got a couple of the M7 discovery boards on order for use as the first Cortex-M target for vNext. Based on the state of the industry I'd like to move away from having a single reference and move to where we have a set of them with at least one for each major architecture. Though this is an area worthy of some separate discussion.

When considering reference ports to place into the repository it is difficult to maintain the integrity of the tree and code base if we can't test and validate them all with every commit. (We had a problem with that recently where things building from GCC were busted). Something for us all to consider is how we organize that aspect of things. For example, do we continue putting them all into one tree and hope we don't mess things up? Do we require a "donation" of hardware to a central test lab before accepting new ports, and who pays for that lab? Maybe we need to split the ports to their own repos? lot's of things to consider there. If we can nail the Packaging part of vNext then the HAL level code could really be a separately maintained package. These are some of the issues we'll need to iron out going forward. One of my major design goals in vNext is to better isolate the NETMF core runtime from the underlying platform code so that getting NETMF up and running on new silicon is a lot easier for most users (For those bold enough to be using brand new or pre-release silicon it may still be a challenge as there might not be any existing low level code to run on top of but it won't be any more work than getting anything else to run under such circumstances)

There was some Gitter chatter about NETMF not being in the GitHub/dotnetmf org for .NET Foundation and speculations on broader political meanings of that. Let me set the record straight on that - The reasons are far more mundane than any grand politics or doom/gloom predictions:

The .NET Foundation was barely an infant when we set up the GitHub org with .NETMF ownership under MS OpenTech. As Microsoft, under Satya's leadership has, dare I say. Opened up to Open Source 😁 - MS OpenTech was no longer viewed as necessary and .NET Foundation was in full swing. However, NETMF had already created the NETMF org to host the interpreter and a few other projects. We needed an org to host NETMF, dotnetmf wasn't available and creating our own was the best option available at the time. It is possible to transfer but it isn't without disruptions for users (upstream repositories would all need to be manually reset, etc...) so we just stayed in this org. If that fact is consider important enough we can move but everyone with a local clone would need to make manual adjustments and any third party links from other online sources would have to be re-directed. So far I've considered that not worth the effort, I'm open to hear otherwise from the community.

[tpspencer]

@smaillet-ms Steve thanks for the great explanation of what is going on. I look forward to vNext.

[piwi1263]

@smaillet-ms inform us about the team / organisation behind it with a nice who we are wiki page(s) and we try to achieve etc. this will help in understanding and prevent from derailing.

[IngenuityMicro]

I am willing to put my hand up to help in anyway i can so that NETMF gets more traction and has a bright future as it as an outstanding solution for many embedded projects.

As the people who have used NETMF in conjunction with VS already know of the massive benefits that the Eco System brings so it will be a crying shame if project stalls.

I have a few ideas that i will put in motion ASAP that will hopefully help generate more discussion and up the visibility of NETMF.

[smaillet-ms]

@piwi1263 A point I was trying to make, and apparently failed t do so, is that the GitHub Team isn't really indicative of a set of people governing or driving the project, the GitHub team is an access control feature nothing more. Ultimately from the definition of team people seem to be looking for here - I'm it at the moment.
This is why my focus right now is on documenting what we have and defining the "clean slate" approach to building up vNext. An additional advantage of the clean slate approach is it allows the entire community to participate as it builds up, hopefully bringing a broader sense of knowledge and community ownership to the project. From that, I hope will fall out some natural team players we can formalize into an official team.

[josesimoes]

@smaillet-ms thank for your detailed answer.

I think that everyone involved kind of figured it out that NETMF is not a Microsoft product for a long time. Nevertheless, your explanations are very welcomed. Probably should have been matter for a blog post or kind of an official announcement. But that is in the past now.

On the confusion about OSS vs product: asking Microsoft for institutional support and to make use of its powerful social and network channels to promote NETMF, is not the same as asking Microsoft to treat NETMF as a product. Is it? To be perfectly clear: I wasn’t asking for that.

Regarding the recent vNEXT branch of NETMF: that should be discussed under a different issue (see #493), so it won’t get mixed up with this one. (actually I’m not entirely convinced that a ‘GitHub Issue’ is the best ‘channel’ to carry these discussions)

[smaillet-ms]

@josesimoes GitHub issues are the best available forum we have for discussions. Gitter doesn't support proper threaded conversations. Figuring out who is replying to what in GIthub is tough enough and worse in Gitter.

Unless someone has the time to build and fund the ongoing maintenance of an online web forum we don't have anything else to go with. (I'm open to suggestions here as I'm not fond of the very limited issue tracking capabilities of GitHub in general, and even less fond of Gitter)

[I long for the day when VSTS would support public repositories... ]

Microsoft for institutional support and to make use of its powerful social and network channels to promote NETMF, is not the same as asking Microsoft to treat NETMF as a product. Is it?

Yes, that is part of the definition of treating it like an MS owned product. It hasn't really existed as such a thing since the move to CodePlex years ago. However, remnants of the various support have lingered (e.g. you can still find old docs on MSDN but they haven't been updated to the latest version as that takes some significant resources to develop and maintain) While it is sometimes possible to get marketing support when things align perfectly that takes a lot of effort and lobbying. To better understand that - pretend for a moment Microsoft doesn't exist - and instead we are talking about leveraging ARM, given how much NETMF usage is on ARM that seems like a great fit - But we'd have to spend a lot of time meeting with folks from ARM, showing value and products using NETMF on ARM, etc... all of which takes serious dedicated effort and time. It also requires that we have a viable story they want to hear and think their customers want to hear.