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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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.