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MS Releases .NET Source, Sort Of
cam_macleod writes "A friend at Microsoft (he's a nice guy, really!) pointed me to their release of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) source, which builds successfully on Windows, FreeBSD, and MacOS X 10.2 -- he says Linux too, but their website strangely doesn't mention it!"
This is not new. Microsoft released this long ago in an effort to show that .NET really *is* cross platform. Here are the changes (as listed on the website):
Support for Mac OS X 10.2.
Additional code clean-up and bug fixes.
Debugger improvements.
Class reference documentation (separate archive) and additional samples.
Build system improvements and additional test cases and tool improvements.
No. Timothy is a moron, and doesn't really understand what the download is. You can't download the source to the .NET framework. You can download the source to a Common Language Infrastructure implementation.
.NET Framework includes an optomized implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure. But, the .NET Framework also includes a huge .NET class library, including the Windows Forms classes, the ASP.NET classes, the ADO.NET classes, WebService classes, and a host of others. Most "useful" .NET programs are going to use some of the .NET classes.
.NET framework includes more than this, but the classes are the important part for portability.
.NET class libraries for free, either.
The Microsoft
The
Basically, think of CLI as essentially just a compiler and a small standard library. To build a complete application, you're still probably going to use a lot of additional libraries. Microsoft hasn't gone insane, and they still understand that their Operating System is valuable. They haven't started distributing kernel32.dll for free yet, and they aren't going to be distributing the
I should point out, though, that C# and the CLI are pretty damned cool all by themselves. They're rocking sweet technology, and there's no reason a good portable class library couldn't be put on top of them, like Sun has done with their Java implementation.
However, I sort of wonder if MicroSoft hasn't pissed off too many of the big players in the world -- I don't expect Oracle or IBM or Netscape to pick up the CLI and run with it, incorporating it in all of their new products, like they did with Sun's JVM. Ooops, did I say Netscape? Nevermind.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
it's not so much an attack on the GPL, it's just saying tht you can't relicense derivatives under something like the GPL. In much the same way as you can't relicense derivatives of GPL work under any other license.