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Microsoft Open Sources .NET Micro Framework
An anonymous reader writes "Back in July, Microsoft announced it was making .NET available under its Community Promise, which in theory allowed free software developers to use the technology without fear of patent lawsuits. Not surprisingly, many free software geeks were unconvinced by the promise (after all, what's a promise compared to an actual open licence?), but now Microsoft has taken things to the next level by releasing the .NET Micro Framework under the Apache 2.0 licence. Yes, you read that correctly: a sizeable chunk of .NET is about to go open source."
More people using .NET would be a gain, wouldn't it?
OR maybe they just think that this will be the best thing for the framework. Maybe they feel that if they get more people using it, it will only strengthen their hold on the market, while making the open source crowd happy.
Yay, I have a sig.
Haven't people been yelling about for years how you can make money with open source? Maybe someone at MS believed them. Despite the general feeling that MS is "out to get you", a company is made up of people, and is not a big bad menace who does evil for evils sake. MS as a corporate entity has exactly one goal (the same as any other company) - make money for its investors. If they can make more money with open source then why is it a surprise they would pursue that avenue?
Microsoft knows that mobile development is booming right now and their best chance to get into the market is on very accessible powerful development tools rather than the Windows OS which is quickly losing market share. If Microsoft can have mobile developers coding in .NET, having them be familiar with Windows development is trival (since the Framework obstruficates most of the OS API.)
If the Framework gets ported to non-MS platforms, having those developers develop on Visual Studio, on Windows, in Windows eco-systems is additional trivial.
I am absolutely certain that iPhone development is causing iPhone developers to learn and be comfortable with XCode on Mac machines while at the same time creating more skilled Objective-C coders that will be more proficent in writing normal OS X applications.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
The ability to sell support services.
try { Signature mysig = new CleverAttempt(); } catch(NonCleverSignatureException e) { postanyway(); }
I'm not a .NET developer... but I seem to remember having to run .NET applications with the .NET framework on my local machine?
I'm not sure how much Microsoft gains by keeping .NET closed-source. Perhaps that's a good question, too: why not open source it. I don't think you have to pay anything to do .NET development, do you? So may as well get any free improvements from the open source community. ;)
Wake me up when they open source the main .NET framework. They put this out there because no one is using it.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
Yeah... open source doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. In fact your point is nonsensical as because you have the source you could port it to whatever platform you want. Seriously, wtf are you blathering on about?
Ugh, I guess we'll have to eat this boring oatmeal...
It's A Trap!
Bow-ties are cool.
You don't train a misbehaving dog to be well-mannered by whacking it one every time it wags its tail.
Making it open source allows you to use it, distribute it, and modify it. Even if nobody ports it to your favorite platform, it's still a win for the users. No longer do you have to depend on Microsoft for bugfixes. No longer do you have to hope that, one day, they will implement the feature you're waiting for. Microsoft is no longer the only party allowed to improve the platform or tailor it to your needs. Once it's open source, everyone is allowed to do so.
So while you are right that making the software open source doesn't magically make it portable, it is far from meaningless.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I know you're joking and I don't mean to direct this at you necissarily but I think it should be said.
Many companies suck. They abuse their positions and take advantage of their customers, they manipulate the writing and interpretation of laws to suit their ends, they sue innocent people in an effort to scare people into respecting their intangible rights. Slashdot, correctly, berates them when there is news about this kind of thing. We help spread knowledge of their actions and provide sometimes insightful analysis which in turn, I hope, gets passed on to others outside the slashdot crowd.
However, when one of these companies does something right, instead of saying "Good first step, you've got a long way to go but this helps ever so slightly" we berate them just as much as if we found out their datacenters were powered by burning babies. It's not helpful and it's not really fair. You can't punish good behavior just as much as bad and expect to have any effects, it doesn't work on dogs and I doubt it works on corporations.
So, let me (karma be damned) be the first to say: This is a small step in the right direction Microsoft. You have a long way to go, but this, ever so slightly, helps.
The best IDE for .NET development is still Visual Studio by a long shot, and licenses for it aren't cheap.
True -- they're free. Well, not all versions, but you can get a long way with the free versions.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
VS(.NET)
Visual Studio 2008 Express is free.
Windows
Yes, unless you use Mono.
SourceSafe, Windows Server, Sybase SQL
No, no, and no. You have no idea what you're talking about.
The command line .NET compiler (csc.exe)/assembler (ilasm.exe)/SDK has always been free. Visual Studio Express is free. The rest of your list has nothing to do with .NET . Try again.
Command-line interfaces are a thing of the past.
People should use what they are most productive in. If they feel they are most productive in a command-line, then so be it. I have no problem with that, and neither should anyone else. I've seen some amazingly fast, productive people that pretty much never use a mouse. The rest are just "posh" about their supposed "l33t" command-line skills, and pretend everything but their holy command-line is an abomination that deserves to be castrated and fed to pigs.
But come on, you can't go around bashing every thing because "it doesn't have a command-line version". Oh boo hoo. Grow up! Your parents should have taught you a long time ago that the world doesn't revolve around you. And the sooner you start learning that, the sooner you'll stop getting fisted.
-XcepticZP
What is their angle?
They're a company of 40,000+ engineers, a substantial portion of which are not total douchebags, unlike how people on Slashdot seem to imagine them.
Lots of them use open source, lots of them like the idea of open source but, like many on here, have to juggle the realities of a paycheck with their own feelings on the matter.
When you're a company the size of Microsoft, even if you have an internal upswelling of support for open sourcing things, you have to fight both the business people and the lawyers. Its easier to turn a dingy than an oil supertanker, and they're not in a position (like many companies *coughSun*) that open source things in a very two-faced way, on one side claiming they follow The Faith and on the other, really just running a hail mary play in the hope that it'll shore up dwindling relevance.
I'd argue Microsoft opening up things like this is much better for Open Source, as a concept, because they're doing it because they *can*, not because they have to.
There's a reason the .NET team has been so helpful with things like Mono and Moonlight -- when the claws of the business side start to let go, its what the engineers want to be doing.
Actually SourceSafe is dead, has been for a few years, and its my understanding that MS never actually used it for their own code.
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