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!"

Comments

Re:Evil licensing..

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Wrong? Immoral? Unjust? No. Patents on software, just like patents on anything else, exist to encourage innovation. Without the promise of a monopoly-- temporary though it will be-- there would be no incentive to innovate. Of course, the average Slashdot poster would respond that innovation will come from hobbyists and other creators of open-source software, who believe themselves to be acting philanthropically. The average Slashdot poster hasn't the foggiest idea how the world actually works, and has no respect whatsoever for the power of the profit motive.

And unconstitutional? Please refer to Article I, section 8: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." All patents are fundamentally constitutional, as long as they are granted for a limited time.

I feel dirty.

[subuni]

I feel dirty. I started by downloading a tarball from Microsoft, and after extracting the tarball, I ran a shell script that built a Microsoft product from source. I then invoked a Microsoft compiler from a UNIX shell, am greeted with a Microsoft copyright message, and get an .exe file as output. And then I ran the .exe file on a UNIX based Mac.

Something about that experience felt really... dirty.

And for the unofficial 'benchmarks' on my G4/800 (because printing out "Hello World!" is a valid benchmark :) ):

# time clix hello.exe
Hello World!
1.240u 0.460s 0:03.28 51.8% 0+0k 0+9io 0pf+0w
# time java hello
Hello World!
0.200u 0.190s 0:01.72 22.6% 0+0k 2+14io 0pf+0w
# time perl hello.pl
Hello World!
0.000u 0.000s 0:00.02 0.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
# time ./hello
Hello World!
0.000u 0.000s 0:00.01 0.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w