Linq to Sql started life as:

" ...a humble Visual Studio project on my desktop machine way back in the fall of 2003..."
Matt Warren

It only reached production when ObjectSpaces failed to ship with VS2005 (it took a dependency on the ill-fated WinFS).

In November 2007, ownership of Linq 2 Sql was transferred from the C# team to the SQL Data Programmability team.

And now, microsoft are finally poised to release their long-anticipated ADO.Net Entity Framework (aka, 'EF').

Maintaining both EF and L2S involves some clear conflicts of interest.

So, here's a brief Edward De Bono style "Plus/Minus/Interesting" analysis of the question:

'should Linq to sql go open source?'

Plus:

It could get a lot of people working on it.
Features could be added based directly on community need, eg.
- mockability
- multiple providers
- ability to refresh portions of the model without refreshing the entire thing.
- ...and other alleged showstoppers

Minus:

If it doesn't get many contributions, then it could effectively kill the product, as it would be hard to move it back in-house.
It would probably become impossible to ship it as part of the framework, due to liability concerns.
Open Source is Communism ;-). (ah, kidding)

Interesting:

It could represent a hedge-bet / fallback position in case Entity Framework doesn't take off. (EF is pretty big and i'm a little worried that it won't take off).
With or without it being open sourced, the community (that's us!) can create awesome third party products, add-ons and scary work arounds to extend or test linq to sql

What are the chances?

Have an open source edition, at codeplex.

and then have an internal version too, with a difference license, so it can be installed into companies that don't accept open source.

that's what Mysql do!

Linq To Sql is brilliant and we have poured everything into it. there are limiting factors and Microsoft will not fix them!

So we are caught out, just like we were with Remoting!

The problem will be assignment of copyright; in order for it work patches and contributions would have to have their copyright assigned to MS. MS would have to idemnify. Very messy.

I think it probably shouldn't go open source actually. Right now I think we have two viable paths to LINQ-style ORM work:

(a) Use LINQ-to-SQL. I've been using it all year, and it's not as bad as the critics suggest. I should add that we're deliberately not attempting multi-tier work with it. For single-tier (i.e. in our ASP.NET web server) it is working well. Yes, we have had to do some work arounds. But we're happy with them. Our testability workaround, for instance, is based on "fakes" rather than "mocks" and it works very well. It's not nearly as scary as one you link to. All in all, I'm pleased with LINQ-to-SQL.

(b) If you want more advanced solutions (including cross-database support) look at Lightspeed, LLBLGen Pro or any of the other ORMs which do (or soon will) offer a LINQ query API.

I think we'll see on-going community effort in (b), and to a lesser extent in community-authored addons for (a). Microsoft's product doesn't have to be all things to all people; they have already given us the great LINQ-style query API, so competing products can offer their capabilities throgh the same langauge-integrated API.

Rather than trying to make LINQ-to-SQL open source, I think it's better for the community to have an "out of the box" ORM from Microsoft (even if it's limited) plus a good selection of commercial and open source alternatives.

Check out MindScape LightSpeed if you haven't already - it's a good example of the kind of alternative I'm talking about.

LLBLGen Pro ftw!!

That is one awesome tool.

I have not used Mindscape Lightspeed tho'

Another product to look at is EntitySpaces. This is a Linq style entity model that is generated directly out of the database schema, and works with about 7 different databases using .NET 2.0

I've heard about Entity Spaces quite a bit, and toyed with some of its earlier incarnations.

MindScape lightspeed sounds good.

Just cooking up a new little project that will perhaps use JQuery with WCF for the front end and api -- and i was thinking of using Linq2Sql for the back end translation.

Appreciate the feedback.

lb

I don't see that they'll open source Linq to Sql, simply because there's nothing to gain from it from MS' perspective. It's part of the .NET framework now, and therefore it can't be removed nor changed that much.

Personally, I think MS will wait with deciding what to do with Linq to Sql till EF has been released and it's clear if it is going to fly or not.

If you want to add the "ability to refresh portions of the model without refreshing the entire thing" to visual studio without waiting, I have written an add-in for that. Take a look at http://www.huagati.com/dbmltools/

Should Linq To Sql Go "Open Source"?

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