.NET Foundation & The next stage for Silk.NET

The times they are a changin' around these hereparts. We've got a lot of stuff planned for Silk.NET over the coming months, and I wanted to take this opportunity to sum it all up in one nice blog post.

The .NET Foundation

We're pleased to finally announce that we are reaching the final stages of joining the .NET Foundation.

The .NET Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization established to support an innovative, commercially friendly, open-source ecosystem around the .NET platform.

Through the .NET Foundation we're strengthening our commitment to open source and provide assurance that Silk.NET is here to stay and will always be free and open source under a permissive license. Many libraries of this nature suffer inconsistency with regards to releases, or are out-of-date with regards to their upstream specifications.

We believe that becoming a part of the .NET Foundation will allow us to solidify our commitment so that we're able to keep continuous progress with a strong backing and larger exposure to the flourishing .NET open source community.

The .NET Foundation will provide Silk.NET as a project the ability to thrive, as well as give the project greater exposure to the wider .NET ecosystem. Moreover, the .NET Foundation provides the backbone we need to remain fully independent, free, and open-source, forever.

We've moved!

As part of the move into the .NET Foundation, we've moved out of the Ultz organisation on GitHub into the dotnet organisation, which homes other beloved .NET projects (including .NET itself). The goal behind this is to make Silk.NET as independent as possible such that the project can continue to thrive despite external factors, such as those which may flow down from the Ultz organisation, don't affect the project in a significant way.

We'll share more on the reasoning from the Ultz side in due course, but from the Silk.NET side this will benefit the Silk.NET Maintenance Team greatly, in that we no longer have to deal with scenarios where project-level decisions conflict with the interests of Ultz and its customers, which has caused some tension in the past; as well as it allows the project to continue on and outlive Ultz’s relationship with it rather than be cast aside.

Moreover, like with the rest of the .NET Foundation onboarding, this move signifies the move away from the commercial organisation which originally created Silk.NET for use in their own products, to standing on its own two feet free of any influence from a private company.

master -> main

We're a bit late to the party on this, but that's only because we wanted to do all the possibly breaking repo changes at once. Like many open source projects, we've renamed our primary branch from master, historically the "traditional" default branch name but, as part of the black lives matter movement, became less used by projects; to main, a much more friendly default branch name with less controversial connotations.

If you'd like to support the black lives matter movement, please do as while media coverage has faded, the problem has not. Here's a great charity here in the UK: SARI (Stand Against Racism & Inequality) - https://www.sariweb.org.uk

Silk.NET 3.0

Soon we'll be kicking off the next major release for Silk.NET: 3.0! Silk.NET 3.0 is still in heavy planning at the moment, so we'll be announcing more stuff as we solidify our plans, but like the ever evolving .NET ecosystem, this will be a massively innovative update exclusively adopting the .NET 6 platform on both desktop and mobile, as well as including a major set of rewrites across the SilkTouch platform!

We can't wait to show you what we have in store for the next stage of Silk.NET, and we hope you're as excited for this journey as we are! If you have any questions, talk to us in our Discord server or open a GitHub Discussion.