.NET 10

For us, every .NET upgrade since .NET 5 has gone surprisingly smoothly and reduced CPU/RAM usage by 10–15%.

We were even able to downgrade our cloud servers to smaller instances, literally.

I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma.

> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma.

I tried .NET and liked C# as a language. But even though the language and runtime are now open source, it seemed like a lot of the recommended libraries were still commercially licensed, which was an immediate nope from me. I've never encountered that in any other ecosystem.

Recommended by whom? I've been doing .NET for 23 years (since the first beta) and I've never paid for a single library in any commercial project I've been part of.

Moq, lots of PDF libraries, Avalonia, Automapper, MediatR, MassTransit,Telerik stuff,etc.

I'm not inherently against it, we have a problem with opensource being asymmetrically underfunded and if people going commercial is the cost perhaps we've failed.

Avalonia is FOSS (MIT licensed). You only need Avalonia XPF if you are migrating legacy stuff.

Moq is largely unnecessary today with LLMs being able to easily generate mock classes. I personally prefer to hand-roll my mocks, but if you prefer the Moq-like approach, there's NSubstitute (3-BSD).

Automapper and MediatR are both libraries I avoided prior to the license change anyways, because I don't like runtime "magic" and not being able to trace dependency calls through my code. But, there is Mapster and Wolverine to fill those needs (both MIT). Wolverine can also replace much of MassTransit.

Telerik stuff - there are many good FOSS alternatives to these UI components; too many to list since it depends on which stack you're using.

PDF is indeed a sore spot. PdfPig is good, but limited in capability. I've started offloading PDF processing to a separate Python container with a simple, stateless Flask API with PyMuPdf.

> we have a problem with opensource being asymmetrically underfunded and if people going commercial is the cost perhaps we've failed.

Completely agree with this, though. My company and myself personally contribute a lot of time back to OSS, and I feel like that is part of the social contract of OSS. To have these libraries rug-pulled feels like a slap in the face as a OSS contributor and maintainer.

Any recommendation of good alternatives to Telerik? We've been using it for years, but I'm open to considering alternatives even though it doesn't cost me anything to pay for the license.