.NET is open source
Open source on GitHub
.NET is open source and cross-platform and is maintained by Microsoft and the .NET community on GitHub. .NET consistently ranks among the top 30 most active open source projects since 2017, as tracked by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
All aspects of .NET are open source including class libraries, runtime, compilers, languages, ASP.NET Core web framework, Windows desktop frameworks, and Entity Framework Core data access library, and more.
Open for contributions
Yes, we do accept contributions! As with any open source project, we don't just blindly accept everything. The pull requests we receive are reviewed for quality and to ensure they align with the goals of .NET.
We've already accepted over 100,000 contributions from developers from over 3,700 companies outside Microsoft.
MIT and Apache 2 licenses
The various parts of .NET are maintained in different GitHub repositories. These repositories typically use the MIT or Apache 2 licenses. Some repositories license documentation and other forms of content under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
To understand the license used, see specific repositories to understand the license used.
.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.
Over 50 open source projects are part of the .NET Foundation. Microsoft as well as others like VMware (formerly Pivotal), Google, Samsung, and Red Hat have made significant contributions, in addition to our broader community. See how you can get involved with the .NET Foundation.
More than just code
In addition to the code, we aim to make every aspect of .NET as open as possible. The documentation is open source. You can also track what is being built via the .NET project roadmaps and backlogs. On the .NET team at Microsoft, we opened up our day-to-day work with initiatives like our open API review process and the community standups.
The Open source library guidance provides recommendations for .NET developers to create high-quality .NET libraries. The guidance itself is open source on GitHub and developed in partnership with popular library authors.
Supported
You can build your own version of .NET from source code, but most production apps need a supported version of the platform.
Microsoft ships official releases that are built and tested on Microsoft-maintained servers in Azure and supported just like any Microsoft product. See the .NET support policy for details.
Red Hat supports .NET on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat builds .NET from source and makes it available in the .NET Download page. Red Hat and Microsoft collaborate to ensure that everything works well on RHEL.
Ready to get started?
Our step-by-step tutorial will help you get .NET running on your computer.