OpenNETCF's flagship product (the Smart Device Framework) is where OpenNETCF was born.
When the Smart Device Extensions (SDE) preview was released for Visual Studio 2002, several members of the mobile development community jumped in and started doing work with it. They individually set out to learn about the new framework and how they could leverage it for what we were already working on. During the process they collectively "hung out" in the Microsoft public newsgroups answering questions and providing feedback.
By the time Studio 2003 and Compact Framework 1.0 was released the development community had a pretty good understanding of how things worked. They also had a good collection of code snippets and quick samples for the common questions it seemed everyone had. The problem was that they were spending a lot of time cutting and pasting the same answers over and over.
Chris Tacke already had a web site running at InnovativeDSS.com (no longer in existence) with some community forums for another business, so he created some forums specifically for Compact Framework development and all started doing brain dumps into it. Whenever a question was asked, instead of copying and pasting the answer continously a link would be posted and it was a rudimentary searchable knowledge base.
It only took a couple months for things to get busy. The snippets and samples were growing into more and more robust classes. Neil Cowburn and Chris Tacke got together and pitched the idea to the rest of the group that maybe they should put it all together in a single framework under a single project name.
The domain name was registered, a logo was made and the site was launched. It started as just a place to download the classes and to hold CF specific forums, but quickly we built and released Smart Device Framework 1.0 and so it began.
Four years later OpenNETCF has grown their product portfolio and provides various development and consulting services with specialties in .NET Compact Framework, Windows Mobile, Windows CE and .NET Micro Framework. OpenNETCF continues to support the community by providing a Community Edition of the Smart Device Framework and continuing to support Open Source initiatives.