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Open.NET — .NET Libraries Go "Open Source"
An anonymous reader writes "whurley just posted a blog about Microsoft's announcement To Make .NET Libraries available under a crippled 'Open Source' program using their new Microsoft Reference License. The post includes the official pr doc from Microsoft as well as several points about how this really isn't open source. One example: If a developer finds a bug in the code, rather than fixing it themselves and submitting a patch to the community they'll be encouraged to submit feedback via the product feedback center."
You can already see all the source of the .NET framework using Lutz Roeder's Reflection tool. I use this all the time to see how the innards of functions work when something goes screwy with .NET.
If you're interested you can check out the free tool here: http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/
Nowhere in Microsoft's announcement do they in any way claim that they are releasing anything as open source. But hey, don't let that stop you from attacking Microsoft for not doing something they never claimed to do nor have any obligation to do.
Yes, you are right. This does not feel like "open source". You know why? Because it is not open source. Nowhere in their announcement do Microsoft claim it is open source. They even explicitly mention that it is not open source.
A few suggestions:
Okay, yes, I was just pulling words out of the thesaurus at the end there....
So they encourage you to report things to them rather than distributing a patch yourself. So what? Trolltech does this, MySQL does this, Sun does this, Mozilla does this; in fact virtually every significantly-sized open source project encourages you to fix problems through their own channels rather than throwing a patch around yourself. It's just good sense.
I am trolling
Fair enough, but Microsoft is trying to get street cred through a disingenuous use of the term "open source".
Except if you'd read TFA you'd see MS never even mentions the term "open source" or anything like it. They are very clear on what is and isn't offered and it being open source is certainly not one of thier cliams. That term come from a blog.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
The original 1991 team that developed the Microsoft Foundation Classes 1.0 (to go with the first Microsoft C++ compiler, and even before the first C++ Visual Studio) was planning to go completely "closed source." It makes sense from a library point of view to close access to the implementation, and only offer the interfaces in header files. However, I was one of the folks on that team that felt that since this was the first "thin" wrapper on the C Win32 API, it was more important to show just how thin that wrapper was, and to offer visibility into the MFC implementation. It wasn't "open source" but it was "source provided as documentation." You could still build MFC on Borland's Win32-ready compiler, in fact. Since I myself was fairly experienced with Win32 but not with C++ (as was the target market), I felt this was a reasonable compromise.
Before you throw eggs at me, let me point out that I then left that group before they invented CDocument and all the ugly MFC hell that has become associated with bloat. Before CDocument, it was essentially a reasonable alternative to STL with some HWND wrappers. Afterwards, the command-routing and OLE-managing framework turned almost any MFC app into a real rats' nest of unmaintainable spaghetti. I still wrote apps in MFC, but I have less and less stomach for it, in the rare instances I must develop Win32 at all.
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I was wondering how slashdot would report this story. I knew that they would give it negative spin because it's not open source, but I didn't think they would actually try to suggest that Microsoft claimed that this was open source and then bash them for not meeting that claim.
.NET libs into VS 2008, including downloading the appropriate source from Microsoft's site on demand. There are other goodies as well.
Microsoft fully acknowledges that this code is to be released under MSRL, "Microsoft Reference Licenese", which Microsoft does not claim to be an open source license (it is not one of the Ms licenses that were submitted to OSI).
But the code is still valuable as it eases debugging. This similar to Microsoft's providing the source code to ATL, MFC, and their CRT. Much of this code was already available under Rotor2, but now we get lots more code, including WinForms and WPF, and more will be rleased in the future.
And it's not just code, but Microsoft including integrated debugging of
See here for detaitls:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
No offense intended, but I'm not sure how a post like this got modded so far up. Are we passing out tinfoil hats at the door now? (I know, I know. I must be new here.)
.NET language, everyone's writing apps to run on Windows, etc. Microsoft all over the place.
.NET devs to see/debug through the .NET libraries, making developing using their stuff more attractive to some subset of the developer community, or
Let's take as a given that Microsoft would like all developers to be using their technologies. In their perfect happy world, every developer is using Visual Studio as their IDE, their language of choice is a
In pursuit of that goal, is it more logical that they would make this move to:
A) Allow
B) Begin an intricate long-ranging litigation scheme against something like Mono, that even fewer developers than the subset in (A) know much about, that in no way is currently posing any kind of threat to their dominance (such as it is), on the off chance it might bear some kind of fruit years down the line?
Shit, Bond villains don't even bust out plans like the scenario you've concocted.
Sure, MS is greedy. Sure, they don't hold sacred the principles of freedom that you do. Sure, they may be evil -- but they're a generally *sensible* kind of evil, the kind that isn't building an elaborate cannon that shoots heads of lettuce while guns are available.
These actions are intended on hurting Mono while pretending they intend on "helping". Whats going to happen is they are going to go through the Mono code and find anyone who agreed to this licencse and see if they contributed to Mono.
.NET is NOT open source: It is pretending to be open source.
Its putting cheese in a mouse trap so they can do a SCO only for Mono, I advise nobody working on Mono go near this code. FOSS means the ability to see, modify and rediribute code,
Basically Microsoft is the "Intelligent Design" crowd of the software community, open source systems are growing in popularity and Microsoft knows they cannot destroy it from the outside (look at SCO) so they attempt to destroy it from within by pretending to be open like the "Intelligent Design" pretend to be scientific.
So Microsoft are attempting to skew the view of what open source is so they can attack it like the ID crowd attempts to confuse of what abiogenesis and evolution actually are so they can attack their little strawmen
How can you miss this? It's as clear as day! If you are working on the Mono project, stay away from the bait!
Make SELinux enforcing again!