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'Shared Source' .NET Overview

Posted by timothy on from the fwiw dept.

Lisa writes: "As part of Microsoft's Shared Source initiative, the company announced Tuesday the public availability of more than 1 million lines of Windows and Microsoft .NET source code--aimed primarily at universities. I guess Microsoft hopes to slow down academic support for the open-source Linux OS. Don't know why they expect this to work, but Brian Jepson has a nice overview of this shared source release."

4 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Merely an example by jquirke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the Microsoft website:

    Developers interested in the internal workings of the .NET Framework can explore this implementation of the CLI to see how garbage collection works, JIT compilation and verification is handled, security protocols implemented, and the organization of frameworks and virtual object systems.

    and

    The Shared Source CLI goes beyond the printed specification of the ECMA standards, providing a working implementation for CLI developers to explore and understand. It will be of interest to academics and researchers wishing to teach and explore modern programming language concepts, and to .NET developers interested in how the technology works.

    Before people criticize Microsoft for whatever reason, and claim that this was done in Microsoft's best interest, then you are absolutely right. Microsoft, will, ultimately benefit most from this release, but so will the community.

    I guess Microsoft hopes to slow down academic support for the open-source Linux OS.

    How so? What is it about this release that suggests anything to "compete" at all with Linux?

  2. Actually... by Daftspaniel · · Score: 3, Informative

    Microsoft have released source code for years. For example the MFC Class library has the source provided with Visual Studio which helps for debugging.

  3. Don't look or you'll be tainted! by SteveX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "One of the key considerations that went into the design of the Rotor's shared source license is that a programmer should be able to look at the Rotor source without becoming tainted."

    So much for that particular conspiracy theory.

    - Steve

  4. FSF General Counsel's Opinion by bjepson · · Score: 4, Informative

    > If you want to do real open source,
    > do not look at the poison.

    Eben Moglen, General Counsel to the Free Software Foundation, told the DotGNU project that programmers will not be tainted by reading the source, so long as they don't copy any of the code.

    - Brian