The .NET Foundation is the independent 501(c)(6) non-profit that owns the .NET open-source brand — outside of Microsoft. Thimo Buchheister has a community speaker / organiser bio listed there. Here's what that means and why we made the effort.
What the Foundation actually is
Incorporated on 31 March 2014 and announced live at Microsoft Build 2014, the .NET Foundation was launched alongside the release of 24 open-source projects — including Roslyn (the .NET Compiler Platform) — under its umbrella. The founding board was three people: representatives from Microsoft Open Technologies, Microsoft's .NET team, and Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza.
Today the Foundation stewards 556+ active projects, including:
- .NET itself
- ASP.NET
- Entity Framework
- Roslyn
- MSBuild
- NuGet
- Orchard CMS
- MimeKit / MailKit
The board has up to seven elected directors plus one Microsoft-appointed seat. Funding is from corporate sponsorships plus individual members — historically Microsoft was the largest single funder, but the Foundation has deliberately diversified, and that matters: it means licenses, repositories, and trademarks survive any single corporate decision.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Microsoft can change strategy. Products get killed. Priorities shift. Housing .NET's open-source brand inside an independent non-profit means the platform we've bet ThreeB IT on isn't a hostage to any one vendor's quarterly roadmap. The license-agnostic, OSI-approved policy means projects aren't trapped in a single licensing track either.
For a Microsoft-stack software house — which is what ThreeB IT is — having that independence backstop is non-trivial. It's the difference between .NET as a Microsoft product and .NET as a public ecosystem that Microsoft sponsors. Those sound similar; they're not.
What "community speaker / organiser" means
Thimo's bio page carries the community speaker / organiser tag, granted on the strength of his role running the Ibbenbüren .NET Meetup since 2017 — before ThreeB IT existed.
It's a recognised contributor status, not paid. What it grants is a public bio page on dotnetfoundation.org plus a verified signal to conference organisers and corporate sponsors that the person carries ongoing, real community responsibility — not a self-declared LinkedIn label.
The pattern across the rest of our community work is the same: .NET Conf sponsorships, the local meetup, Bitkom membership, the Sessionize profile for talk-circuit submissions. They reinforce each other. The .NET Foundation entry is the anchor.
Where to go next
- The Foundation's board of directors page is the right place to see who's currently steering things
- The corporate sponsorship page lists the companies that actually fund it
- Thimo's bio links to the Meetup group, the GitHub profile, and the talk channels