It’s our pleasure to announce that as of today, Akka.NET is officially part of the .NET Foundation! Akka.NET is joining an elite group of projects such as Roslyn, NuGet, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and others.

What Does This Mean for Akka.NET?

Open source foundations have been a mainstay of OSS projects across many different platforms for years; ultimately what they provide to OSS projects are legal support, marketing help, and general project guidance. This includes things like protecting the project’s copyrights, ensuring that its intellectual property is in good standing and is properly assigned, etc.

In general the goal of the .NET Foundation is to help ensure that all of its projects follow OSS best practices in order to increase adoption of OSS across the entire .NET ecosystem.

Akka.NET already has major users such as Bank of America, SNL Financial, Schneider Electric, Boeing, and others. And the rate at which Akka.NET is being installed and deployed into production is increasing all the time. We’re joining the .NET Foundation in order to help broaden the tent of Akka.NET users and send a signal to potential users everywhere that Akka.NET is in it for the long haul and that our project is enterprise-friendly.

The core development team behind Akka.NET will continue to do what they’ve been doing; our roadmap and our priorities are driven by achieving parity with our partners at Lightbend and the Scala implementation of Akka and by the demands of our users. Joining the .NET Foundation will enable us to focus on our code, samples, and documentation while it helps us keep the project’s IP and community standards in good hands.

Announcing the Akka.NET Contrib Organization and the 2017 .NET Foundation Summer Hackfest

One other big change we wish to introduce is the new Akka.NET Contrib Organization.

We’ve spun some of the Akka.NET plugins for logging, dependency injection, unit testing, Akka.Streams, and Akka.Persistence into this organization with goal of attracting OSS contributions that are more focused on Akka.NET’s plugin ecosystem rather than the Akka.NET core framework itself. Thus, we’re interested in teaming up with some new contributors who are invested in the Akka.NET ecosystem and are interested in helping bring some of these plugins to the rest of the Akka.NET ecosystem as a whole.

You can see a list of the current plugins and some of the proposed new plugins here.

Akka.NET Contrib and the .NET Foundation Summer Hackfest

We’re also pleased to announce that Akka.NET will be participating in the 2017 .NET Foundation Summer Hackfest! Our project will take place during session 3, August 21st through September 1st, and the goal of our project will be converting all of the current projects in Akka.NET Contrib to .NET Core and Akka.NET 1.3 (announcement on that soon!)

Our team will be working closely with all of the hackfest participants in order to give them project guidance and mentoring. If you’re interested in participating, please follow the .NET Foundation on Twitter for updates.

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