Here is a short little blurb on why everyone and their grandmother uses LAMP/RAILS open source products and comparatively there are very few .Net projects in existence.
I was having an interesting conversation with some buddies the other day about the current status and future direction of open source projects. It really seems that the software industry is flooded with LAMP or RAILS open source projects and rarely .Net. From one of my C#/.Net developer buddies came the question:
Why do you think people gravitate towards more open source / LAMP packages for online content distribution?
It took me a while to really get a good perspective on this and I think I can offer a few bits of incite. I should mention I consider these not to be ultra enlightening objectifications.
Maturity
With the whole Blog “phenomena” going crazy the past few years we’re talking about more and more ordinary people wanting to etch out their little corner of the net. These people aren’t willing to shell out money for blog software. The whole Blog push was actually being *driven* by open source software from the start. It was only until it really started to become popular that other companies like Movable Type started joining in on the fun to make some money. With Blog software being founded on free technologies, this ultimately meant that there were many more available developers to contribute to making the software better since there was literally no cost to contribute. The same can’t be said for .Net development.
Target Users
.NET development shops are all about money. That’s just the nature of the beast. Its really hard to spend the serious cash involved in getting a development environment setup and a product created without wanting to recoup some of those thousands of dollars shit to the wind to the MS beast. This can really be a good thing. Off the shelf components all come with a price tag and while this really sucks for the little guy, the corporations that utilize said goodies have at least SOMETHING to hang onto for leverage when it comes to support for the product.
