I am happy to announce that Octopus Deploy is now a corporate sponsor of the .NET Foundation, the non-profit organization established to support the open-source ecosystem around the .NET platform.
As an independent software vendor, we use a number of open-source projects to build Octopus Deploy. We donate to some of these directly where we can, we’re sponsors of Material UI, Cake, JUnit, Pester, and a few others. We also make a lot of our own code open-source, including our communication stack, deployment logic, ORM, all of our build server integrations, and pretty soon our Tentacle deployment agent. Our team members also contribute to a variety of open-source projects in both their professional and personal time. Healthy open-source is essential to our mission and core to who we are.
More generally, we also rely on a vibrant, sustainable open-source ecosystem around .NET. We forget, but it was open-source projects that enabled practices like unit testing, build automation, dependency injection, and object/relational mapping in .NET. Not all open-source projects want direct sponsorship, but many projects can benefit from the .NET Foundation’s efforts in championing the adoption of - and contributions back to - .NET open-source projects.
As a corporate sponsor, we get a seat on the Advisory Council. These seats are rare, so we want to use it wisely. We thought hard about who would best serve the .NET community’s interests in the long term, and so we’ve asked Nicholas Blumhardt, the creator of Serilog and Autofac - two of the most popular open-source .NET projects - to take our seat. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Nick for the last decade and working with him years ago, and I really think Nick’s presence on the advisory council will be a very positive influence.
We think the .NET Foundation can have a bigger impact if it isn’t wholly reliant on Microsoft for funding, and that with a growing variety of corporate sponsors, it will be able to achieve some important things and be a force for good. As a company that contributes to and benefits from open-source, we’re proud to chip in and give back to the community, and hopefully make open-source a little more sustainable.
