OWIN is not Katana is not vNext, or is it?

A lot of people get confused about OWIN and Katana, especially in their relation to vNext. To properly explain the differences between these things, let’s take a step back into the mid 2000s where ASP.NET (WebForms) was starting to see a lot of people moving away from it, towards things like Ruby on Rails. The reason for that being the fact that WebForms was this huge ugly beast, giving developers a bastardized model of the web to work from. WebForms abstracted away much of the “web” part of web development, and gave us things like the now-dreaded ViewState. But WebForms…