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MS: Use the Source, Luke!

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the look-into-my-palantir dept.

McSpew writes: "The WSJ (via MSNBC) has an article about Microsoft's upcoming push to get universities to use .NET code in programming courses. Their code-sharing initiative is all about winning hearts-and-minds at the university level, where Linux and open-source rule the day. The article does a good job of explaining the issues and why MS may yet fail in spite of their push. I wish the article had discussed the reverse-engineering issues of needing 'virgins' who have never seen the product being reverse-engineered and how MS's newly broad distribution of its code makes finding virgins much more difficult."

3 of 454 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Non-compete by splume · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, I was reading the EULA waiting for the presentation to start, and with the copy of VS .NET it stated that any software you created with the academic version absolutly HAD to port to a MS OS! Talk about locking you in. Sheesh.

    --

    Who is John Galt?
  2. More Information: Taken From My K5 Submission by Carnage4Life · · Score: 5, Informative
    Microsoft has released a shared source implementation of the Common Language Runtime (CLI).The Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) is the ECMA standard that describes the core of the .NET Framework world. The Shared Source CLI is a compressed archive of the source code to a working implementation of the ECMA CLI and the ECMA C# language specification. The shared source CLI license is available here.

    Features
    • An implementation of the runtime for the Common Language Infrastructure (ECMA-335) that builds and runs on Windows XP and FreeBSD
    • Compilers that work with the Shared Source CLI for C# (ECMA-334) and JScript
    • Development tools for working with the Shared Source CLI such as assembler/disassemblers (ilasm, ildasm), a debugger (cordbg), metadata introspection (metainfo), and other utilities
    • The Platform Adaptation Layer (PAL) used to port the Shared Source CLI from Windows XP to FreeBSD
    • Build environment tools (nmake, build, and others)
    • Documentation for the implementation
    • Test suites used to verify the implementation
    [This is mostly cut & paste from the MSDN page]

    A few semi-interesting threads have started about this on K5 including this one and this one.
  3. Mono by miguel · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Mono implementation (http://www.go-mono.com) and yesterday's release (Mono 0.10) does provide pretty much everything that the Shared Source release does.

    Get your bits now!

    Miguel