So, yes, Wolverine overlaps quite a bit with both MediatR and MassTransit. If you’re a MediatR user, Wolverine just does a helluva lot more and we have an existing guide for converting from MediatR to Wolverine. For MassTransit (or NServiceBus) users, Wolverine covers a lot of the same asynchronous messaging framework use cases, but does much, much more to simplify your application code than any other .NET messaging framework and should not be compared as an apples to apples messaging feature comparison. And no other tool in the entire .NET ecosystem can come even remotely close to the Critter Stack’s support for Event Sourcing from soup to nuts.
It’s kind of a big day in .NET OSS news with both MediatR and MassTransit respectively announcing moves to commercial licensing models. I’d like to start by wishing the best of luck to my friends Jimmy Bogard and Chris Patterson respectively with their new ventures.
As any long term participant in or observer of the .NET ecosystem knows, there’s about to be a flood of negativity from various people in our community about these moves. There will also be an outcry from a sizable cohort in the .NET community who seem to believe that all development tools should be provided by Microsoft and that only Microsoft can ever be a reliable supplier of these types of tools while somehow suffering from amnesia about how Microsoft has frequently abandoned high profile tools like Silverlight or WCF.
As for Marten, Wolverine, and other future Critter Stack tools, the current JasperFx Software strategy remains following the “open core” model where the existing capabilities in the MIT-licensed tools (note below) remain under an OSS license and JasperFx Software focuses on services, support plans, and the forthcoming commercial CritterWatch tool for monitoring, management, and some advanced features for data privacy, multi-tenancy, and extreme scalability. While we certainly respect MassTransit’s decision, we’re going to try a different path and stay down the “open core” model and Marten 8 / Wolverine 4 will be released under the MIT OSS license. I will admit that you may see some increasing reluctance to be providing as much free support through Discord as we have to users in the past though.
To be technical, there is one existing feature in Marten 7.* for optimized projection rebuilds that I think we’ll redesign and move to the commercial add on tooling in the Marten 8 timeframe, but in this case the existing feature is barely usable anyway so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Shade Tree Developer 