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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!"
Remember "many eyes".
.NET it all your fault.
If there are any security problems with
(I'm blind, don't blame me!)
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.
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 write in my journal
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