Microsoft .Net Libraries Not Acting "Open Source"

figleaf writes "Three years ago, with much fanfare, Microsoft announced it would make some of the .Net libraries open source using the Microsoft Reference License. Since then Microsoft has reneged on its promise. The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum."

Comments

This should have been seen from the start

[yakatz]

As most people who have tried to write a blog can testify, it is hard to maintain a procedure by force; the reason why so many new blogs are abandoned. If the culture at Microsoft is anti open-source, it will take a constant effort to continue this type of project. The power was obviously not there.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Jurily]

Let me get this straight: nothing happened for a year and a half, and that's news?

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[jgagnon]

Well... I didn't know it wasn't happening... :p

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Threni]

I'm not sure why an abandoned site with a dead blog and no progress is somehow seen as un "Open source" like - the poster has clearly not looked at many open source projects!

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[man_of_mr_e]

First, Microsoft did not promise anything open source. They promised a read-only shared source version under the reference license. They delivered that, and are still delivering it, though as of yet no .net 4.0 libraries.. but that's only a couple of weeks old.

The reason the site hasn't been maintained was the the functionality was moved into visual studio for automatic download. It's just a part of the tools now.

Basically, the entire story is wrong.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[WeatherGod]

The reason the site hasn't been maintained was the the functionality was moved into visual studio for automatic download. It's just a part of the tools now.

So, why didn't they update the site to explain that? I don't know... something doesn't seem right to me.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[h00manist]

I'm not sure why an abandoned site with a dead blog and no progress is somehow seen as un "Open source" like - the poster has clearly not looked at many open source projects!

Somehow or other, you would assume this "open source project" had a little funding, at least for one developer to update the blog and one line of code in 18 months. I heard they had programmers at Microsoft.. come to think of it, maybe the regular undecipherable-source-software gets written by the salespeople, accountants and lawyers?

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Halborr]

You expect Microsoft to tell users what's going on?

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Svartalf]

Heh... I didn't care it wasn't happening... >;-D

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Anpheus]

There's free and open source alternatives to Visual Studio for coding .NET, and for native code there are myriad tools that run on Windows. Probably the best maintained is MinGW.

If you don't like the Visual Studio toolchain, then you don't have to pay for it. And the cheapest Visual Studio that does the in-IDE debugging of .NET framework code is about $800, but I hear you on the price. It's a pity they axed Standard edition but I understand their motives.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Anpheus]

The .NET source code is not redistributable or licensed freely, and they've said as much. The source code is there for debugging purposes only. It'd be like if Apple let you step through their Core libraries when debugging in X-Code. Apple wouldn't be saying, "Go on, take this code and write your own set of libraries to totally supplant ours!" (This would piss Jobs off far more than porn on the iPhone.)

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[man_of_mr_e]

Yes, it's available in Visual Studio Express. And yes, you need to download VS because the code is used to step through in debugging. Without the debugger, it's not much use given it's license.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[man_of_mr_e]

Since when is "Free" $2000? Visual Studio Express, free download, no restrictions on what you can build with it.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[man_of_mr_e]

They posted it in many places, for example:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configuring-visual-studio-to-debug-net-framework-source-code.aspx

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[LinuxAndLube]

Actually, this is all I needed to know. Which button do I press to make all other posts go away?

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Elektroschock]

Thank you for clarifications.

What I always wonder is why Microsoft does not keep "backwards compatibility" with documentation urls. It always gets moved around and lost.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Saint Gerbil]

I got the 4.0 reference source it works in VS2010.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[Saint Gerbil]

The "express" version is free, limited yes but you can get to the documentation TFA is about through it.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[drewpt]

Just because a project comes from a company doesn't mean there is a budget or backing behind it.

Re:This should have been seen from the start

[drfreak]

Correct. And it is available already in Visual Studio 2010. You just need to turn it on in the program options. Once I turned it on, all the public symbols get downloaded and cached for .NET when you run your code. I've already seen it in use when one of my apps threw an exception and the debugger helpfully went straight to the correct source line in Form.cs.

Same old, same old

[ls671]

Same old, same old. Some things will never change.

I am still glad to hear about this specific topic although, just for my personal information.

Of course

[Ltap]

I'm sure that no one here is surprised.

Re:Of course

[Monkeedude1212]

I bet they expected the OS community to have mirrored the reference code sites, start their own blogs, and master the libraries and dole out advice, if they really wanted the .NET Libraries to be Open Source.

Not defending Microsoft, it's not exactly cool, but like you said, what were they expecting?

Re:Of course

[Millennium]

The scary part here is that I'm sure plenty of people here are surprised. I wasn't ready to trust Microsoft, and I'm sure many others here weren't either, but an astonishing number of people -including some people in very high places, and yes, Mr. de Icaza, I am looking at you- were. Enough that there were flamewars any time anything remotely .NET-related or Mono-related came up.

Hopefully, we'll be able to get on with our lives now. This has happened before, and will probably happen again, and the community always survives. Some very interesting tools will either die or need to be ported, but that's always how it goes.

Re:Of course

[Vahokif]

You mean like Mono? The submission is (intentionally or out of ignorance) trying to confuse the read-but-don't-touch "open source" reference implementation that no one uses, their legally binding promise not to sue anyone using open source implementations, and the stuff they have licensed under the OSI-approved MS-PL license.

Re:Of course

[Bing Tsher E]

Hopefully, we'll be able to get on with our lives now.

On Slashdot? When the topic concerns both Microsoft and Open Source??

Don't fool yourself.

Re:Of course

[godefroi]

No, the scary part here is that everyone believes TFS without bothering to check what's really going on. Microsoft didn't open-source anything. They made the source available to developers through Visual Studio so you can debug into the framework libraries. It worked then, it continues to work now.

This is just some idiot stirring up the anti-Microsoft faithful with a dead blog (*gasp* dead blog? Conspiracy!) and a website that hasn't been updated because there is no new information.

They did exactly what they said they were doing, and they never stopped.

Sons of Bitches

[Jorl17]

That's all I can say. I've had enough of them and their lies.

Re:Sons of Bitches

[Anonymous Coward]

...what, just NOW?

... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word...

[QuietLagoon]

... why?

How is this different?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum.

How is this different from the majority of "real" FOSS projects on SourceForge?

Re:How is this different?

[Americano]

At the Microsoft site, nobody responds to your questions.

At the SourceForge site, someone responds to your questions with, "You have the code, figure it out yourself, asshole."

Worlds of difference, you see.

Re:How is this different?

[sunking2]

I agree. Sounds to me like they've fully embraced the Open Source mindset. They probably have to get rid of 75% of their documentation though.

Re:How is this different?

[Monkeedude1212]

Microsoft has a forum

Ziiiiing!

Re:How is this different?

[machwon]

This one was supposedly run and supported by the biggest software company in the world, not by a high school student in his basement.

Re:How is this different?

[forgottenusername]

do you mean sourceforget?

Re:How is this different?

[Monkeedude1212]

They made it open source so that they didn't have to support it.

Then when they stopped supporting it, the open source community went Huh?

Re:How is this different?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly; it's not an open-source project if you can learn about it without having to read reams of un-commented code.

Re:How is this different?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that the "dead" sourceforge projects are maintained by usually one person and that person has lost interest, or was satisfied with the code. On the other hand, Microsoft is a large corporation which should be able to maintain large projects in the long term.

Re:How is this different?

[Coren22]

No no no, that should be Biiiing!

Re:How is this different?

[MBGMorden]

Hey at least it's out there if someone wants to pick it up and go.

That's the beauty of actual open source.

I saw a prime example of this lately. I recently migrated to Ubuntu from Windows. I used a download manager in Windows called FreedDownloadManager (http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/). It's OSS(GPL), but it's written with Win32 in mind, so porting it would just be a mess. I found a decent download manager for Linux called Downloader for X(D4X), but it's been abandoned. The source code IS available, but unfortunately it's under a custom license that doesn't allow derivative works.

As a result, even though the app mostly works, it needs a few tweaks here and there that are going to prevent me from using it. Right now I'm using KGet, but it clashes with my mostly GTK desktop and has a few of it's own quirks.

Result? Because of the restricted license, despite an existing app being 95% of where I need it to be, I've had to start coding a new one from scratch. If sourceforge had had a GPL'd but abandoned project already there, then I could have avoided the hassle.

Re:How is this different?

[mikael_j]

Or they'll upload a javadoc/pydoc dump of their uncommented and undocumented code as well, which is about as useful as simply being told to figure it out yourself.

Another possibility is of course that the maintainer comes up with some fairly lame excuse for not working on the project ("my dog had puppies a year ago and I've been completely dedicated to playing with them...") complete with promises of getting the project up to date ("...but I've been looking at some of the patches that have been submitted and there's gonna be a big update any day now.") which means most people will hold off on forking the project.

Then there's the "it's in CVS" projects, you know them, those projects that are required by a whole host of apps yet they haven't had a proper release since 2006, and before that the last release was in 2003, but hey, you can just grab the extremely active development branch from CVS/SVN/Git!

The last one has a close relative, the "1.x is featureless and out of date (but still gets security patches) and 2.x has been in alpha for three years now" projects. Just like the "it's in CVS" projects the bulk of interesting code for these tends to be in source control or in the 2.x.y.z.alpha23.tar.bz2 releases, and if you dare use the dev/alpha branch and find a problem with it and file a bug report you'd better be prepared to be chastised for not also submitting a patch...

And last but not least there are the "closed" projects which rarely accept patches from "outsiders", they have a dedicated group of developers who will tell you to write your own patch and submit it when there's a bug that's been around for over a year with all reports closed as "WILLNOTFIX" or "NOTABUG", and when you do it will be rejected only to have one of the "regular" developers submit an almost identical patch a few days or weeks later (yes, this has happened to me a couple of times, can you feel the bitterness?).

Re:How is this different?

[mrchaotica]

And last but not least there are the "closed" projects which rarely accept patches from "outsiders", they have a dedicated group of developers who will tell you to write your own patch and submit it when there's a bug that's been around for over a year with all reports closed as "WILLNOTFIX" or "NOTABUG", and when you do it will be rejected only to have one of the "regular" developers submit an almost identical patch a few days or weeks later (yes, this has happened to me a couple of times, can you feel the bitterness?).

Even if the code is open source, that's still plagiarism.

Re:How is this different?

[somersault]

Are you not allowed to update D4X for personal use? Of course, making something that other people can use is always nice and saves someone else going through the same hassle.

Re:How is this different?

[rnturn]

> that should be Biiiing! I was thinking it should be "Bazinga!"

Re:How is this different?

[rnturn]

> that should be Biiiing!

I was thinking it should be "Bazinga!"

(Oops! Wrong format. Fixed that.)

Re:How is this different?

[MBGMorden]

I don't think you're technically allowed to, though in reality regardless of license you can for all practical purposes modify something like that for personally use. Still though, I figure if I'm going to put in the effort anyways, I might as well publish it. Hence I started rewriting it in Mono (yeah, I know, but most of my GUI development experience is with Visual Studio as it's what I typically program with at work, so the transition to MonoDevelop is easier).

Re:How is this different?

[Americano]

And if you listen to all the talk here on slashdot, you'll easily conclude:

1) Microsoft is bad at anything they do. Terrible. Absolutely no business attempting anything in technology because they only exist for their goal of returning us to the dark ages.

2) Free Software-supporting high school students are the smartest people on earth, and write software that is orders of magnitude better than any of these "pros" who work wage-slave jobs for proprietary-software companies.

Given that, I'd say it's entirely reasonable to expect that SourceForge and other FOSS repositories would be orders of magnitude more active, well-supported, and well-constructed than anything those bumbling idiots in Redmond would be capable of.

Re:How is this different?

[MBGMorden]

You "know", but you're doing it anyway. What's the point? In a year, your code will be rotting like the rest, because it will be unusable to most people, despite being 95% "there".

What are you going on about? Mono-based code can be released under an OSS license, meaning it'll be plenty usable by other people if they so choose. I merely put in "I know" because some people have an (unreasonable IMHO) aversion to Mono. Any code that I end up putting out will be GPL licensed.

Re:How is this different?

[greylion3]

Actually, d4x was released under the Artistic License: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-1.0.php
From a brief read of it, I don't see much difference from the GPL.
You're certainly allowed to modify it. Section 2 and 3 say:

"2. You may apply bug fixes, portability fixes and other modifications derived from the Public Domain or from the Copyright Holder. A Package modified in such a way shall still be considered the Standard Version.

3. You may otherwise modify your copy of this Package in any way, provided that you insert a prominent notice in each changed file stating how and when you changed that file, and provided that you do at least ONE of the following:

        a) place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise make them Freely Available, such as by posting said modifications to Usenet or an equivalent medium, or placing the modifications on a major archive site such as ftp.uu.net, or by allowing the Copyright Holder to include your modifications in the Standard Version of the Package."

There is also an Artistic License 2.0, but the original homepage for d4x is down, so I can't tell whether or not it was released or relicensed under AL 2.0.
If it was, it's allowed to change the license to a compatible one such as GPL, MPL, or Apache.

It's also included in all debian releases since at least 4.0 (Etch): http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=d4x&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all. I don't think it would be, if it wasn't GPL-compatible.

Maybe you got hold of a version of d4x, that was relicensed inappropriately?

Re:How is this different?

[arkane1234]

I think we have it covered by historically accurate data that Microsoft never invents anything with the intention of even twitching without attempting to fuck someone.
It's not that we feel this way, it just has been engrained in their very core since they were born. I've watched it, evidentally you're pretty young. Either that or Vista was the first OS you've heard of.

Re:How is this different?

[Americano]

All of which is relevant to my point... how, exactly?

I've yet to see MSFT given credit for doing anything well here on Slashdot, but then people profess shock and dismay when they appear to not have fully embraced the open source ethos and done so better than "a kid in his basement" could have.

Re:How is this different?

[MBGMorden]

Do you know where it's listed as being under the Artistic License? Distributed with the source in the documentation all I can find is the following (emphasis mine):

1.1 License

Alas, the license is not the GPL. What does this mean? This program is
distributed without fee, even with open source code. Accordingly, the author
assumes no responsibility for any damage which might be inflicted by this
program. But the author reserves unto himself the inviolable right of
exclusive modification of the source code. This means that any other
person may distribute this program only "as is," that is without modification
of the source code. If you are considering introducing some sort of modification
you are OBLIDGED to send it to the author for incorporation into the program's
official code. NO ONE other than the author of this program HAS THE RIGHT
to distribute MODIFIED versions of this program. This restriction is made
chiefly in order to centralize the project, to avoid the appearance of various
"offshoots" of this single program. Naturally, upon the completion of work on
the program, the present license will give way to the GPL.

Re:How is this different?

[Volguus Zildrohar]

Ned Ryerson?

Re:How is this different?

[Elektroschock]

So what, of course you should pay for support.

Re:How is this different?

[Elektroschock]

But why can't Microsoft provide decent documentation?

Re:How is this different?

[clone53421]

SourceForge and other FOSS repositories would be orders of magnitude more active, well-supported, and well-constructed than anything those bumbling idiots in Redmond would be capable of.

Isn’t the point that many of them are?

Re:How is this different?

[Jozza The Wick]

There's a open source downloader I found called Multiget (http://multiget.sourceforge.net/) that seems to have been based on FDM. I was essentially looking for the same thing - an FDM for Linux. I tried to tweak a couple of things myself, but my C++ isn't up to scratch - I'm still a beginner. Would be interested to help out if I could though...

Re:How is this different?

[greylion3]

Well, this was the man page I found yesterday:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/d4x
And, if you get the package from debian or ubuntu, it has the Artistic License.

Anyway, I just noticed that f I install d4x (version 2.5.7.1-4 in debian 4.0), the binary is called "nt", and d4x is just a symlink to that binary. The man page installed along with it refers to "nt" and not d4x.
Maybe the license was changed from the artistic one at some point by the author, which probably means the source code was forked by debian developers and the name of the binary changed in the debian fork.

So, get the source package from debian or ubuntu, and you can modify it all you want. I'm assuming that the name change won't bother you.

Summary Misleading

[SomeJoel]

I know it's fun to bash Microsoft and all, but the source site here is not, in fact, dead. The other points in TFS might be valid, but I have doubts as to the poster's credibility. I believe this "figleaf" character may just be trying to score some free karma or jollies or something by inciting the standard "M$ sux" response.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The other points in TFS might be valid, but I have doubts as to the poster's credibility.

Even if the statements about the blog and the forum are true, there's no requirement for open source projects to have active blogs and forums.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

1. It's true that the reference source site has been down for several days but now appears to be up again
2. It's also true that NOBODY from MS has been responding to questions about the lack of .Net 4.0 source code, or any other question for that matter about reference source

I'm not bashing MS in general; in fact, I make my living by developing solutions centered around MS technology. However, I'm extremely annoyed at the lack of proper maintenance of the reference source archive. Not only about the bits that have never made it there to begin with, but that almost a month after the release of .Net 4.0/VS 2010, there's still no code for .Net 4.0. !

Re:Summary Misleading

[mpapet]

I think Microsoft's goal is/was to pollute the term 'open source' to mean things friendly to Microsoft's practices like this read-only license.

The license cites the code available as "read only."

"Reference use" means use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products....

http://referencesource.microsoft.com/referencesourcelicense.aspx

Oh, and yes, Microsoft still sucks. In this case it's because their brand of misinformation is particularly toxic to innovation.
   

Re:Summary Misleading

[H0p313ss]

inciting the standard "M$ sux" response.

*pfft* Like that would work...

Re:Summary Misleading

[alfredos]

I know it's fun to bash Microsoft

Actually, "fun" is an overly simplistic definition of it. Actually, it's an art that has some of the features of a sport.

Re:Summary Misleading

[RobDude]

Maybe this is a stupid question; but isn't getting the source a trivial task?

I thought there were free tools available that would turn .Net .DLLs into code?

Re:Summary Misleading

[noidentity]

I believe

this "figleaf" character may just be trying to score some free karma or jollies or something by inciting the standard "M$ sux" response.

I get the idea he's hiding something, not sure why.

Re:Summary Misleading

[RobDude]

Maybe I'm missing the point but I'm *glad* there is only one version of the .Net Framework 4.0

If the source was truly open, I'm sure someone, somewhere, would make something awesome, that I'd want to use, but it would require me using the forked (or whatever they call it) home-brew version that may or may not introduce instability into my application.

And when I took my problem online and said, 'WTF! I'm just doing System.Console.Writeline()' why doesn't this work!' it would lead to all sorts of confusion.

But yeah, I'm probably missing the point as my understanding of OpenSource is limited. I just don't see why you'd ever want to a modified version of the .Net Framework.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Utopia]

They fixed it as soon as this story was posted. Tricky Microsoft!
Look at the forums. It was dead for more than a week.

Re:Summary Misleading

[gyrogeerloose]

I get the idea he's hiding something, not sure why.

Or what.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Utopia]

1. It's true that the reference source site has been down for several days but now appears to be up again
2. It's also true that NOBODY from MS has been responding to questions about the lack of .Net 4.0 source code, or any other question for that matter about reference source

I'm not bashing MS in general; in fact, I make my living by developing solutions centered around MS technology. However, I'm extremely annoyed at the lack of proper maintenance of the reference source archive. Not only about the bits that have never made it there to begin with, but that almost a month after the release of .Net 4.0/VS 2010, there's still no code for .Net 4.0. !

The lack of of .Net 4.0 code bugs me too. But fortunately VS 2010 supports .Net 3.5 too, so its easy to figure out the issue by debugging using 3.5
When the reference site was down even that was possible.

Unless you are using the new concurrent stuff or other .Net 4.0 specific stuff, debugging in 3.5 works fine.
I used to clean the my symbols cache folder periodically., but I have figured out how valuable it can be when Microsoft site goes down.

Re:Summary Misleading

[recoiledsnake]

open source != Open Source. Look it up. One is a English term, another is a copyrighted term.

Re:Summary Misleading

[DarkOx]

Yes there are plenty of tools that use the reflector; which is thwarted by the obfuscator. Even if you can reflect the code you get from stripped libs wont have the original symbols so its pretty hard to work with.

Kinda like when you generate assembly from machine code. Oh sure you get the code but you are going have to go over it line by line to understand anything.

Re:Summary Misleading

[RobDude]

Gotcha - thank you.

Re:Summary Misleading

[kimvette]

It's not open source; it is "shared source."

What is shared source?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source

IIRC a number of products were made "shared source" in this manner, such as Windows Mobile 5 and earlier.

Re:Summary Misleading

[VTEX]

I know it's fun to bash Microsoft and all, but the source site here is not, in fact, dead.

Funny how a very active site says "© 2008 Microsoft Corporation" in the footer.

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

But you do actually get your source releases, right? Like, it might not be on the timeframe you want, but you get them?

I know it's horrible when someone makes a valid criticism of Apple, but if I took something of yours and gave it back to you when /I/ was ready, rather than on the terms we agreed when you took it, would you be happy?

Re:Summary Misleading

[aztracker1]

Parent Misleading. There were a few different open-source implementations of the .Net CLI early on, with Mono pretty much at the forefront now. Mono has significant portions of .Net 4 ready for use. As always, Mono is an implementation that contains the core Ecma/ISO bits, and overlaps a lot of MS's extensions, without implementing many of those pieces highly tied to windows, or that don't serve non-windows developers.

As to why you'd want a modified version. Well, embedded systems, Linux, Mac OSX and other operating system environments for one, being able to port your .Net application to OSX, and even write iPhone/iPod Touch apps via C# is pretty compelling. Unity3D is pretty big for development as well, targeting OSes beyond windows. It comes down to pretty much anything outside of windows you'd want to develop apps for would be a good case for another runtime, so long as MS doesn't produce the same code for other OSes. Beyond this MS is directly and indirectly supporting the development of Mono, where OpenSource is saving MS tons of cash, and they're able to get their runtime platform in other environments. I, personally, appreciate this effort.

I do think a lot of the anti-mono sentiments are pretty unfounded compared to other technology (FAT32, NTFS, SAMBA, and others).

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

I can't believe it! When they release a major revision to their operating system, it sometimes takes them weeks to finalize a new release of the source code? That's... that's...

...licence non-compliance. Apple are welcome to write their own toolchain if they don't like the GPL. Also, I know the first couple of service packs of a new Apple major OS release are awful, but I'm fairly sure they've finalised the source they're using before they build the ISO.

"Don't talk when your mouth is full of toe jam."

I'm bothered by hypocritical Apple's living perfectly up to the 1984 image it mocked while millions of second rate users and developers waste my time and retard the computer landscape through being distracted by shiny junk. You're bothered because some guy puts his foot in his mouth to make a point about, well, you.

MS, meanwhile, are fairly clear about where they stand. The last time they were caught abusing GPL code, they apologised and released the whole product under the GPL. With TFA's news they've shown to act fairly, well, Apple about the extent they want to foster commercial OSS... except MS do it with stuff they've written in the first place.

Apple's behaviour with OpenDarwin was a harbinger of the attitude Jobs has taken to developers since. Now you too can make money shovelling shit into the mouths of idiots as long as we get our unearnt cut and you take it like a man when we cut you off at our whim.

Re:Summary Misleading

[jedidiah]

> Fucking Slashcocks and their mindless self-entitled whining.

If Apple is using some bit of GPL software then they have a legal obligation to provide source. Expecting a multi-billion dollar corporation to live up to their legal obligations is hardly "self-entitled whining".

Your kind of bullsh*t is why the GPL was invented to begin with. Jerks like you can't be trusted to play nice with everyone else. So a framework needs to be in place to force you to.

The rule of law is not just for individuals. It's for Corporations and St. Steve too.

Re:Summary Misleading

[jedidiah]

> it sometimes takes them weeks to finalize a new release of the source code?

Not my problem.

If I have a copy of the a GPL binary, the distributor has a legal obligation to provide me the source.

If the binaries are ready to ship, then putting the source in a tarball is not some oppressive and unreasonable burden.

Mindless Apple fanboys with no technical knowledge are something else.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Americano]

If I have a copy of the a GPL binary, the distributor has a legal obligation to provide me the source.

Yes, they do. However, the GPL does not say anywhere that they must provide you the source on the day they release the binary, and in fact specifies no "acceptable timeframe" for doing so.

You may not be aware of this, but in the lead-up to a commercial software release, there is often a huge scramble to get everything finalized. In that scramble, "creating a tarball of the source code" is simply not that pressing a need, considering the GPL requires you to provide a copy of source to "users of the binary," and by definition, if you haven't yet released your software, there can be no users of that binary.

Your wish for a speedier release is not a legal obligation. You can brand me a clueless apple fanboy if you want, but the simple fact is, Apple is in no way violating its obligations by taking "a few weeks" to gather the source code together and release it to the public - to imply that this desire of yours is in some way a binding obligation on apple (or anybody else) is simply wrong.

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

and by definition, if you haven't yet released your software, there can be no users of that binary.

Within minutes after you've released, you will have distributed to users. And the moment you have distributed, you have an obligation under the licence. It's obtuse to the highest order to pretend that you haven't anticipated that your product will have users, or to pretend that your obligations under the licence of the code you distribute aren't of paramount importance.

Apple is in no way violating its obligations by taking "a few weeks" to gather the source code together and release it to the public

Only a court can decide that for sure. But there's a tangible competitive advantage in forcing someone to wait a few weeks for source code, so it's thoroughly and tangibly unreasonable to require it. It's also immoral to give something back on your terms something you took on mutually agreeable terms.

Internet reasonable for distribution is a few hours. Weeks is immoral or pathetic.

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

Sigh. As far as GPLv3 goes, this is Apple's obligation:

# b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

Apple's not make that offer when it's distributing OS X, because, as you've admitted several times, it doesn't have a network server on which to offer source code at the time of release. Nor is several weeks a reasonable timeframe to fix their dishonesty - it's a breaking of terms and avenue for competitive advantage.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Americano]

And the moment you have distributed, you have an obligation under the licence.

Yes, you have an obligation under the license to provide any user who requests it with a copy of the source code.

The GPL only dictates that they must provide it to users who request it - not that they must provide it within moments or hours of the demand being made. Good luck arguing before any reasonable court that Apple saying, "Sure, we'll get that to you in 3 weeks," is somehow a violation of the terms of the GPL.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Americano]

Which part of item 2 does this server not cover?

Your only objection is that they don't post things up there as quickly as you might like; Unfortunately, the GPL says nothing about how quickly the source must be made available, only that it must be made available.

Any reasonable person understands that nontrivial tasks take time to accomplish. Their posting of source code within several weeks of the binary release is a nontrivial task, and therefore... takes time. You can pout all you like about how slow they are, but the fact of the matter is that they have not violated the terms of the GPL, because the GPL says nothing about how quickly they're obligated to give you access to the source code, or send you a copy.

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

False on several counts. Read the licence. If you're not distributing source physically, you must provide an offer "to give anyone who possesses the object code [...] access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge."

Where Corresponding Source (CS) is "all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities."

Thus:

1. The CS must exist as a prerequisite to distributing object code - if Apple claims it needs to do any preparation, it's not actually providing "Corresponding Source";

2. The CS must be available from a network server at no charge, otherwise Apple are wilfully offering something which they know doesn't exist when the other party can reasonably assume that it does exist (because of 1, and because it's explicit in the contract terms);

3. The only acceptable delay is between making the offer and providing "access". The court must then decide how long is reasonable to provide access to an existing and prepared network server. I submit the amount of time it takes to e-mail out a URL as a few seconds, but in Apple's case paragraph 2H of the EULA makes it quite clear how to access the server already, so it is erasonable to assume that what is advertised in the EULA as at that server actually exists there.

Re:Summary Misleading

[shutdown -p now]

I think Microsoft's goal is/was to pollute the term 'open source' to mean things friendly to Microsoft's practices like this read-only license.

I invite you to find any mention of the term "open source" at the linked website, or at the original announcement.

Microsoft has always been very careful about OSS, and that includes terminology. It's precisely why terms such as "shared source" and "reference source" are used - to avoid confusion with Open Source as it is commonly defined in the industry.

I've no idea why the author of the Slashdot article inserted "open source" there, because it isn't that, and it was never announced or advertised as such. The only confusion here stems from improper use of the term by third parties, not by Microsoft.

Re:Summary Misleading

[shutdown -p now]

It's not quite as simple.

There are two things that are missing in Reflector output compared to the original code: local variable names, and comments. All class member named etc (including private ones) are fully preserved. This is different when IL obfuscation is involved, but .NET standard libraries aren't obfuscated.

The other problematic thing is that there are certain high-level constructs in C# - e.g. LINQ queries, lambdas, or iterator methods - which are basically syntactic sugar for some more primitive stuff. Reflector - so far, at least - isn't smart enough to "restore" the sugar, so decompiled code will contain lower-level primitives. E.g. where the original code had a lambda, you'll see an explicit instantiation of the closure class, and delegate creation for its method.

All in all, though, Reflector output is quite readable, and is nowhere near a native disassembly in complexity.

Re:Summary Misleading

[10101001 10101001]

Maybe I'm missing the point but I'm *glad* there is only one version of the .Net Framework 4.0

Actually, AFAIK, there's actually a few versions of the .Net Framework 4.0 released by Microsoft. There's at least a micro version and the standard version.

If the source was truly open, I'm sure someone, somewhere, would make something awesome, that I'd want to use, but it would require me using the forked (or whatever they call it) home-brew version that may or may not introduce instability into my application.

That's a pretty funny fear, actually. By the same logic, you don't like the idea of there being multiple makers of CPUs, compilers, etc because one of them might seem better than what you're currently using and any switch away could introduce the risk of instability. In short, your complaint is one that choice includes potential risk. Well, if you're so afraid of various non-Microsoft forks, then you can *choose* not to use them and avoid that perceived risk. Nothing about having choices forces you to choose something other than what you wish to use.

And when I took my problem online and said, 'WTF! I'm just doing System.Console.Writeline()' why doesn't this work!' it would lead to all sorts of confusion.

Sure, if you posted on a Microsoft forum about a non-Microsoft fork you could generate confusion for yourself and others. Oddly enough, this confusion would have more to do with you failing to provide a proper context to your problem than anything to do with there being multiple forks.

But yeah, I'm probably missing the point as my understanding of OpenSource is limited. I just don't see why you'd ever want to a modified version of the .Net Framework.

To have bugs fix that Microsoft won't fix? At some point, .Net Framework v4.0 will be old and unsupported. When that time comes, some people and companies would prefer to maintain a fork of the v4.0 line than to port one or more applications (consider how happy IT folk would be if they could patch up IE6 to their heart's content for intranet use).

Re:Summary Misleading

[Americano]

You are splitting semantic hairs in an attempt to lawyer Apple into some sort of GPL violation. They are not violating the GPL, because the GPL simply says "you must make the offer to supply source code," and they have done that.

If it takes them time to get the source code uploaded onto the server and made available, the GPL has nothing to say on the matter of how quickly that has to happen - just that it must.

And with people with your attitude on the open source side, FOSS advocates will still wonder why businesses are wary of investing significant efforts into open source work, and "contributing back to the community." I'd say it's pretty evident here that so long as Apple doesn't adhere to your extra & imaginary GPL clauses, it's guilty of violations.

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

the GPL simply says "you must make the offer to supply source code,"

The GPL doesn't "simply" say that. It's more specific. You can't simplify a legal document, interpret it in your simplified light, then call the consequences of the words you've ignored "imaginary".

How very 1984 for someone siding with Apple to accuse an FSF advocate of "lawyering"!

FOSS advocates will still wonder why businesses are wary of investing significant efforts into open source work, and "contributing back to the community."

1. Considering its requirements, GPLd/quasi-GPLd software has had more investment than I'd ever have expected from business.

2. Even if it hadn't, much of the community wouldn't care. All they want is code distributed for everyone to use and improve, and the only thing asked for is that you comply with the simple terms.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Americano]

One more time, I'll ask you to please provide for me the clause of the GPL which states one of the following:

1) The source code must be provided within 'X' days of the release of object code.

2) The source code must be available on your download server the day you release your object code.

Because from where I'm sitting, you're the one applying your own special interpretation of the GPL to the situation because Apple aren't as responsive as you might wish. The GPL *does* simply say you must provide the code - it does not say a single thing about what the timeframe is for the code to be provided to users of the object code.

If you can't provide a reference to that clause (which you can't, because it doesn't exist, and we both know it), then you have to admit that your demand for simultaneous release of object & code are your own personal preference, and not an obligation under the terms of the GPL. And as such, you can hold your breath and stomp your feet all you want, but none of that obligates Apple to satisfy your whims.

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

The GPL *does* simply say you must provide the code

No it doesn't, and I've quoted what it actually says enough times that I've concluded you're being deliberately stolid, you laughable fanboy.

But I look forward to offering you a plot of land with a house on it. I'll enjoy the interest accrued while I take advantage of your lackadaisical reading of contracts to take a reasonable amount of time to build the house after you've paid. It's enough that the bricks already exist - don't get so pissy that they're not yet in the right place!

Re:Summary Misleading

[Americano]

What you've failed to do is cite any part of the GPL which specifies timelines or other date / time requirements for delivery of the code.

Of course, your housing example shows just how much of a reach you're making by trying to claim the GPL contains terms which it clearly does not contain. A proper P&S contract for a home will specify quite clearly the terms of sale, including dates for move-in and transfer / acquisition of title. Those things are built right into the contract - complete with consequences and/or opt-out clauses for failure to deliver on time - unless you have a complete incompetent for a lawyer. The GPL contains no such provisions, leaving the interpretation of "when" the code must be delivered as a matter for 2 parties (or a court) to determine.

If you don't like Apple's delay, take them to court and get a ruling against them if you think you can. Good luck getting a court to enforce a clause of a license which only exists in your imaginary interpretation of the GPL.

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

A proper P&S contract for a home will specify quite clearly the terms of sale, including dates for move-in and transfer / acquisition of title.

Stop pseudo-lawyering. The ownership transfer may be implied to occur when a particular event has occurred, such as cleared transfer of funds. As to whether there are written "consequences" for "failure to deliver", this is just complicating the nature of the required performance in the case of the house sale. For Apple and the house seller, the court still exists to compel performance or enforce collection of damages.

The GPL contains no such provisions, leaving the interpretation of "when" the code must be delivered as a matter for 2 parties (or a court) to determine.

No, it doesn't. The terms of the GPL reinforced by the Apple EULA imply current availability, not future availability.

If you don't like Apple's delay, take them to court and get a ruling against them if you think you can.

I, as an end user, have suffered only a minor breach. I'd claim as damages the loss I've suffered by not having access for n weeks to the source code which was indicated as available in the EULA. This is fairly hard to quantify, and, what with all those silly disclaimers in the EULA, pointless to argue.

The FSF, on the other hand, own the copyright to the code Apple are pirating, and have a good argument for material breach. They're the only ones who can push to require specific performance of Apple.

Re:Summary Misleading

[Americano]

Stop pseudo-lawyering. The ownership transfer may be implied to occur when a particular event has occurred, such as cleared transfer of funds.

It's not pseudo lawyering, it's factual representation of a typical P&S contract for a home. Very little is "implied" in that contract - if you expect to be able to transfer the funds by Date X, it is put in the contract, along with a clause saying, in essence "If you don't do this by Date X, seller/purchaser reserves the right to declare this contract void," along with specific statement of what happens to any deposits, etc. that have been paid.

The terms of the GPL say nothing about current availability; In fact, they state that the binaries must be accompanied by a written offer to provide the corresponding source. In other words, at release, the offer you are making is "to provide" - at some point in the future - corresponding source when the request is made by a user. The user's request is the triggering event in the GPL, not the release of code.

As for the FSF - why would they need to take it to court to "require specific performance" if it's already spelled out in clear detail in the GPL that Apple must release the code within a certain specific time frame? If the FSF doesn't think that Apple is in violation of the terms of the GPL by taking a few weeks to get all the code posted, doesn't that suggest something to you?

In case you're being as deliberately obtuse as I've come to expect, it suggests that the people with what you claim is "a good argument for material breach," who also happen to own the software copyrights and the GPL, don't feel that Apple is in violation of the GPL. That suggests to me that you're reading your own interpretation into the GPL, and what you feel are "reasonable" timeframes are in fact not "reasonable."

Re:Summary Misleading

[FuckingNickName]

Very little is "implied" in that contract - if you expect to be able to transfer the funds by Date X, it is put in the contract,

It's like sitting with an obstinate child :-). A house sale often involves a window of time during which funds can be transferred, and the date/time of cleared transfer corresponds to the date/time of transfer of ownership. Thus the particular date/time is implied, not made explicit.

Someone I do work for has recently completed a house purchase with that very term, and it became pertinent because the bank was delaying the clearing of funds. But because the implied date/time of ownership transfer was the very date/time of clearing, he didn't get the keys until precisely the time of day when the funds were confirmed available. This meant paying an extra half day to the firm responsible for moving furniture, but I digress.

in essence "If you don't do this by Date X, seller/purchaser reserves the right to declare this contract void,"

There's no "essence" to "declar[ing] this contract void", sorry. A void contract isn't a contract at all, because it's not enforcable - e.g. my promising to give you anal. A voidable contract is one that /one/ party can unilaterally renege on, e.g. my promising to give you $15 if I were only 15. The "essence" is contract [performance] complete on both sides, i.e. no further obligations.

Don't decorate your tedious argument with attempts to display your plumage of legal experience (congrats, you once bought a house) if you're going to abuse contract law vocabulary so egregiously.

the offer you are making is "to provide"

That language only appears in paragraph 6c), and that option is available, "only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b."

And don't try to turn your error into an "in essence" argument, thanks: learn to interpret what's there rather than simplifying as you see fit.

If the FSF doesn't think that Apple is in violation of the terms of the GPL by taking a few weeks to get all the code posted, doesn't that suggest something to you?

The FSF has better things to worry about, and for some reason takes a fairly lax approach to Apple anyway - probably because they appeared genuinely interested in OSS around the turn of the century, and the FSF can be glacial in their observations of change. But perhaps Brown and Sullivan's recent essays are a refreshing confirmation of their ideals.

I'm done with you. Your tenacity suggested an albeit stubborn willingness to learn, and I have tried to explain in general and specific terms where you have gone wrong with your refusal to read the language of contracts and understand their implications. You keep repeating the same argument, each time making a new assumption or unjustified simplification. Have a nice day!

Re:Summary Misleading

[Americano]

GPLv3, Section 6b. Emphasis mine.

b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

But yeah, I can see how you'd feel that the offer to provide is strictly limited to paragraph 6c as you stated.

The "occasional and noncommercial" clause in 6c is for people who, say, download Apple's versions under 6b, make some modifications, and then distribute their changes to other Mac OS X users for free - noncommercial, and occasional - not as an actual commercial software product.

Forking

[MC68040]

Maybe someone can answer this better than me, I've not had the time to read over the Microsoft license.
Would it be possible to (legally) fork the project from the latest available codebase? Not saying if anyone would want to do it or not, but if the code is out there that might give some possibilities?

Re:Forking

[Florian Weimer]

No, it's not an open source license. You get to see the source code, but you have no rights beyond that. Preparing derivative works is not allowed.

I believe source code access functionality is now integrated into Visual Studio, so it is not surprising that the web site is not updated anymore.

Re:Forking

[vbraga]

I believe source code access functionality is now integrated into Visual Studio, so it is not surprising that the web site is not updated anymore.

You're right. It's integrated on VS2008.

Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Check "Enable .NET framework stepping".

Wait a while while VS2008 download the debugging symbols and you're done.

Re:Forking

[value_added]

No, it's not an open source license. You get to see the source code, but you have no rights beyond that.

I once knew a girl like that.

Re:Forking

[blackraven14250]

She gave you a DNA sample, but made you sign a license prohibiting cloning?

Re:Forking

[Utopia]

It works only if the reference code site is alive.
The site was dead for a week. I check it a few hours ago when debugging is Visual Studio.
Microsoft seems to have restarted the site when this story hit Slashdot!

Re:Forking

[vbraga]

I've downloaded the public symbols less than a week ago. Maybe its an intermittent issue with their servers.

Re:Forking

[Hurricane78]

She showed you her chromosomes? Kinky! ;)

Bait and switch.

[_the_bascule]

Yup, bait and switch. "We're all warm and fluffy with open source, we're a safe alternative to java, honest, look." *sigh*

Re:Bait and switch.

[TheFlaker]

ooookkkk. The word "reference" should give a hint, it is to be used as a reference when you are using the MS .Net framework in some development project. So, I do not understand what are we expecting from it.

What ever do they mean?

[jvkjvk]

The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum.

This sounds perfectly like most open source projects. I wonder what the exact percentage of dead to alive(and not in the parrot sense) projects there are on SourceForge, Freshmeat, et al. I wouldn't be suprised at least an 80/20 split.

 

Re:What ever do they mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

A dead SF project still has the repository. You can still access the code and do what you will with it.

Re:What ever do they mean?

[just_another_sean]

I wonder what the exact percentage of largest software company in the world hosting an open source project to young, naive programmer thinking he can help by throwing up a sourgeforge page is? Comparing MS doing an open source project to most open source projects hardly seems fair.

To put it another way, if you compare MS to say Apache, Red Hat, Novell or Gnome then MS looks pretty bad at open source. Which, on the surface at least, is surprising because they do a much better job of hosting their MSDN content which is similar in scope to hosting a large open source project.
But it's actually not so surprising considering MS's schizophrenic attitude towards open source in general.

Re:What ever do they mean?

[aztracker1]

I wouldn't consider MS's effort as "Open Source" (tm), but it was available (read, but don't touch) source. IIRC the source was mainly for those wanting to look into the MS internals to be able to do so without the need for Reflector and other tools, because there were incidents where it was genuinely insightful, and necessary to do so, not for most people. The lack of support in this isn't really surprising to me. If someone wants an Open-Source implementation to look at, Mono is probably a better place to start, not to mention a few of the Java implementations as well.

Acting very much like many open source projects

[Fencepost]

How many projects out there become the hot new thing for a week or so, then the primary person working on the project changes jobs / gets married / joins a commune and eventually people start saying "Well, I found this open source project that sounds right, but it looks like it's been dead since 2007."

Re:Acting very much like many open source projects

[ircmaxell]

There's a huge difference. If you wanted to make a modification to an abandoned project, you could just fork it. Here, you can't. So you're tied to requesting the modification from MS... It's a similar theme to many OS projects, but it's not a similar situation...

.net reflector

[ForexCoder]

If you need the source for .NET now, your best bet is .NET Reflector Free Edition (http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/)

Re:.net reflector

[gbjbaanb]

which of course, is also the best way to see the source code for many other companies .net software, even if they didn't expect it to be quite so open :)

Re:.net reflector

[aztracker1]

That's what obfuscation is for.

Well, duh.

[clone53421]

They meant they wanted somebody else to maintain it.

Misleading

[Vahokif]

That's the reference implementation, which is under a read-but-don't-touch-license. .NET itself is an open specification you can read whenever you want, and they recently made a legally binding promise not to sue anyone for using an alternate implementation (like Mono).

Re:Misleading

[MrSteveSD]

....NET itself is an open specification you can read whenever you want, and they recently made a legally binding promise not to sue anyone for using an alternate implementation (like Mono).

I'm not sure if you mean .NET being an ISO standard. If so, only some of .NET is an ISO standard. Much of it, including Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET etc are not. As for Microsoft's "legally binding" promise, it only applies to certain parts of .NET, many of the libraries are not covered.

Re:Misleading

[Anpheus]

ASP.NET and ADO.NET are largely in the "open" part, with very few components in the "not-open, Microsoft internal" part. Mono have implemented most of ASP.NET and it's possible to run ASP.NET code using some of their more recent projects on Apache.

Winforms is so specific (and in many ways, trivial to implement as it's a layer over Win32) that no one would bother implementing it. Most anything interesting that you want to do with Winforms you have to do with p/invoke already. (Want to extend the Aero glass frame into your window? P/invoke!)

I'd say most of the libraries that would matter for open source OS implementation are open. Even WPF has an open specification (though I'm unsure if it's covered by the patent promise) but there's no desire to implement it because it'd require a huge amount of work on the Linux kernel or the creation of a support layer. WPF uses a lot of the basic Windows graphics libraries (DirectX stuff like DirectWrite) for acceleration and other stuff that would all have to be re-implemented. Why bother when it's so much easier to support QT?

Open source quality/theft

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, there is the question of intellectual property. I don't see why Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) should do *anything* to help open source. How many millions of dollars has the open source community stolen from Microsoft over the years through the violation of their patents? Microsoft has found literally hundreds of examples of Linux violating their patents, and not a SINGLE Linux developer has come forward to apologize and offer recompense. Instead, Microsoft has been forced to seek out companies that are using Linux to get them to acknowledge the wrongs that the open source Linux people have committed against Microsoft.

Secondly, there is the question of quality. Open Source has largely FAILED to produce any software that is notably good. Linux is a terrible desktop OS, and marginal as a server. The GIMP pales in comparison to Photoshop. Open source codecs like ogg theora and vorbis are absolute garbage next to their closed source counterparts, etc. Microsoft really is perfectly justified in keeping as far away from the sinkhole of quality that open source represents.

Re:Open source quality/theft

[Anpheus]

I liked the trainwreck of a satire you wrote. It was really good until you started saying thing that are true a little less than halfway through your second paragraph. :)

Big chunks released under Apache license

[harlows_monkeys]

Large parts of .NET, namely those that are using in the .NET Micro framework, have been released under the Apache license.

Re:Big chunks released under Apache license

[devent]

That parts are not "large" parts of .NET. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Micro_Framework
>It also features a subset of the .NET base class libraries (about 70 classes with about 420 methods), a GUI framework loosely based on Windows Presentation Foundation, and additional libraries specific to embedded applications.
The whole .NET micro have just 320KBytes.

Re:Big chunks released under Apache license

[spikenerd]

Large parts of .NET... have been released under the Apache license.

Wahoo! Now we can get .NET apps working to a large extent without having proprietary dependencies!

Re:Big chunks released under Apache license

[Anpheus]

Let me put it this way. If you wanted to write a cross-platform C/C++ application, and you started writing it for Linux, would you place critical dependencies on the Linux kernel and the specific userland that's common on Linux distros, or would you abstract those away to minimize the cost of switching OS?

I think the answer is pretty obvious, and the same applies to .NET.

So....

[shadowrat]

Just like most open source projects!

::ducks::

Re:So....

[Arimus]

Was going to say just that - I can probably find several dozen oss sites that are just as up to date / live.

Re:So....

[Drinking Bleach]

Maybe you can pick a better example, the zlib site itself mentions more than one release just in the year 2010.

tag missing

[techpain]

business as usual?

Lousy post ...

[TheFlaker]

As SomeJoel has pointed ... the sources are there. Even wpf for the 3.5sp1 stuff (fairly new stuff) ... At least try with something more difficult to verify.

Re:Lousy post ...

[Utopia]

WPF 3.5sp1 source is not completely on the site.
The reference blog claims that source for wpfgfx_v0300.dll for example but you will not find it on the reference site.
Even the blog lies.

Anyways, 3.5sp1 is not new. When you have 4.0 released over a month ago.

Re:Lousy post ...

[TheFlaker]

so what? there is a big difference between "nothing is being done" and "I do not have last months RTM source" ... whiners

Profit Motive.

[headkase]

Microsoft as a corporation is sworn to seek profit for their shareholders. Being entrenched in proprietary software a new business model is hard to push there. Do not expect Microsoft to ever work in the favor of Open Source unless there is a clear a profitable reason for them to do so. Expecting anything else is naive.

Which means looking at it contaminates developers.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

No, it's not an open source license. You get to see the source code, but you have no rights beyond that. Preparing derivative works is not allowed.

Which means that looking at it "contaminates" the developers with knowledge of proprietary code.

If this article were about the the code itself, rather than the lack of support on Microsoft's end, I'd hang an "itsatrap" tag on it.

IMHO we're better off if the site DOES go away.

They are acting open source.

[larry bagina]

No news in a year and a half, no source code, forum questions unanswered... sounds like the typical sourceforge project to me!

Re:They are acting open source.

[AaronLS]

What do you mean no source code? It's right there on the site for download. It's a reference, not an open source project.

Embrace, extend, extinguish?

[fahrbot-bot]

Microsoft announced it would make some of the .Net libraries 'open source' ... (now) The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum.

Seems like a logical result to me, given the protagonist and antagonist in this story...

Re:Embrace, extend, extinguish?

[drfreak]

Wait, what? So Microsoft created .NET and is trying now to squash it? Doubtful.

People here think .NET is Open Source?

[Eirenarch]

So it seems like people here think tha MS wanted or at least promised .NET to become Open Source? How completely wrong. MS never said that and never wanted it. They just released the code so .NET devs could debug it. They still can debug it through Visual Studio integration. Microsoft never wanted to contribute .NET source to the community and to allow forks and I believe that I speak to the majority of the .NET developers when I say that I don't want anyone but Microsoft messing with .NET's code let alone creating forks.

Re:People here think .NET is Open Source?

[Eirenarch]

This is why you work with Mono right? I work with the unforkable framework you work with the Open Source framework. Everyone is happy. World peace.

Re:Which means looking at it contaminates develope

[TheFlaker]

1 - You think that everyone cares about starting other framework or whatever. 2 - Sometimes you are under fire and having the sources integrated is great. So at least for me, Id prefer if everything stays like it is.

Re:... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word

[Hooya]

" ... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word ..."

Well, no one should have believed Microsoft at its word. Or Excel. Or powerpoint.

I Was With You Until...

[Petersko]

"We're all warm and fluffy with open source, we're a safe alternative to java, honest, look."

I was getting your point until you hit Java. After watching the litany of trainwrecks that is the expensive java experiment in our company, Microsoft IS a safe alternative. In fact, I'd rather replace all our "successful because they delivered" java projects with a group of elderly asians with abacuses... aba... abacii? That'd be a warm and fluffy alternative to Java.

In other areas of the company they've been delivering .Net projects successfully, so I'm hardpressed to defend Java. We hired expensive, proven guns, too. We didn't half-ass it.

Re:I Was With You Until...

[AigariusDebian]

You don't remember the Microsoft version of Java? The one that was 'slightly' incompatible with all other versions of Java?

And what happened to those who got fooled by them

[unity100]

i wonder. i wonder what those who jumped on the bandwagon because of their 'os move' back then.

Re:It IS appropriate for MS to keep their work goi

[Anonymous Coward]

But they are doing that? The /. article was just written by an idiot who didn't check his shit and wrote bunch of bullshit without any reference.
asp.net MVC 2.0 sourcecode, dated 11 march 2010 http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/41742
freshly updated MS blogs regarding asp.net http://weblogs.asp.net/
forums regarding most MS technologies seems pretty much alive also http://forums.asp.net/
etc...
seems to me everything is very much alive, unlike some other open source projects...

"Source Available" versus "Open Source"

[kervin]

It's too easy to bash Microsoft to have to sink to this.

I don't see anywhere on the blog article linked mentioning .Net is Open Source. In fact I did a browser "find" and the first reference to Open Source is a reply in the comments section.

Scott Gu mentions that the source code is available, which it is, and has been ever since.

Also even if Scott had mention that, how would that qualify as much fanfare. Not a peep from Micrsoft PR.

Finally, since that reference release 2 years ago. Microsoft has released the entire .Net Micro as Open Source, help out Mono in development, and promised not to sue open source implementations. Not quite Open Source, but great strides for a company that was so afraid of the process a few years back.

KDawson gives MS bashing a bad name. ( I think that's going to be my new sig)

Re:"Source Available" versus "Open Source"

[AaronLS]

I totally agree. I created a Slashdot account just so I could try and bring some sanity to this totally misinformed discussion. The Reference Source was never intended, nor was it ever marketed as an open source project. It was released to fill a very specific need, which is to allow users of the framework to better understand the framework and to also allow debuggers to step into .NET framework code. I had hoped I'd be able to upvote accurate comments like yours but apparently only moderators can.

It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[ygslash]

Three years ago, the FOSS movement looked like one of the biggest potential threats against Microsoft. This move was designed to mitigate that threat, so it was worth investing energy in it. The idea was to dilute the concept of FOSS in the mind of the public, thereby weakening the FOSS "brand" as a competitor.

Today, it is appears that Apple and Google are far bigger threats to Microsoft than FOSS ever will be. So Microsoft will not be investing significant energy in trying to dilute the concept of FOSS anymore.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[paulej72]

Comprehension error!
The GP said Apple and Google were threats to Microsoft not Open Source.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[iluvcapra]

Wow you're right. Oops.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[c 0xFF]

Today, it is appears that Apple and Google are far bigger threats to Microsoft than FOSS ever will be.

Both Google and Apple are significant supporters of FOSS. Maybe the enemy hasn't changed all that much? Maybe Google and Apple wouldn't be so threatening had their attacks on FOSS been more successful?

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[aztracker1]

MS has kept quite a bit of OpenSource available, mainly in support of the Mono project. IMHO the reference license for the portions of .Net they were putting out there were less important as a learning tool, and more important in terms of discovering issues in MS's code, vs. your code while developing. The DLR portions (DLR, IronRuby, IronPython) as well as the MVC and MVC Contrib libraries have been very OpenSource friendly from the beginning.

The portions mentioned in TFS weren't ever really to combat or oppose/weaken open source, they were a response to developer demands to be able to legitimately access the .Net internals (without resorting to reflector).

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[sourcerror]

Well, maybe FOSS is just avoiding the reinvention of the wheel? I mean, you don't see much innovation in operating systems, so there's no reason people would buy the same things again and again. (Even Microsoft couldn't pull that off, hadn't it invested in DirectX.)

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[jedidiah]

Apple has exploited FOSS but that is something else.

They bolted their proprietary OS on top of Unix so they wouldn't have to re-invent that part.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[miggyb]

WebKit, CUPS, mDNS, OpenCL, HTML5, to name a few.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[abigor]

I assume that by "exploited", you mean "made significant contributions back to". And it's not an OS bolted "on top" of Unix - if you understood OS X's architecture (and you don't), you'd know that.

Aren't you the same guy who thought OS X wasn't a real Unix because it doesn't have the same filesystem layout as some Linux variant? A brutal mocking ensued, as I recall.

To the OP, you can get lots of Apple open source stuff here: http://opensource.apple.com/

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[ckaminski]

And they did a fucking awesome job at it, too. Compared to OS X 10.6.2, Ubuntu 9.10 is a childs toy.

I've been a die-hard Linux user on the server and in desktop VMs since the Ygdrassil days, and I'm ashamed that a laptop that never once crashed under XP in 18 months has done so five times in less than a month running Ubuntu.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[Z8]

How often did that laptop crash running OS X 10.6.2?

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[Slashdot Suxxors]

OH SNAP!

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[indiechild]

You dispute that Apple took from open source and also contributed back to it?

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[Anpheus]

To expand on what he said, Visual Studio supports downloading and using the .NET source code and stepping through it with the debugger. This lets accomplished users determine where a problem in the code lies if it involves (often-times) complex API calls.

This would be akin to, I suppose, using GDB with your kernel + library sources plugged in as well.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[Elektroschock]

Indeed, but open source continues to make inroads. The defensive strategy doesn't work. Microsoft has to get real on support for open source.

Think of OOXML, they fought an insane battle to get their own ISO/IEC alternate standard format and now they abandonned it. In the end everyone will use ODF anyway.

Google is smarter. Where is the Microsoft summer of code?

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[Elektroschock]

Self-motivation is fine and for the same reasons Microsoft should support open source and reape the full benefits from it.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[Elektroschock]

The operating system doesn't matter, what matters is office. Kill Microsoft's cash cow and they go sane. So indeed Oracle is their largest competitor.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[Saint Gerbil]

Everytime it ran a web page with flash on.

Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear

[man1sh]

WebKit, CUPS, mDNS, OpenCL, HTML5, to name a few.

HTML5? AFAIK HTML5 is not something Open Source. It is just a specification, an open specification. If their open-sourced Safari, then it would mean something

Microsoft has reneged on its promise

[nurb432]

Really..

.. Microsoft, the Obama of software

[MrData]

'Nuff said

Re:.. Microsoft, the Obama of software

[arkane1234]

That has to be the gayest and the most out of the blue thing I've ever heard... at least this week.
Anything to bring something politically motivated out... almost like someone saying they don't like red, then saying "ohhh, red, the obama of colors" or something else retarded... yeesh.

Site works fine and ASP.NET 4 just released.

[DangerJones]

1. referencesource.microsoft.com works just fine.
2. There isn't anything new on the blog likely because they've been busy working on ASP.NET 4 which was only released on April 12 so let's give them a few weeks of sleep-ins before we starting beating them up, m'kay?

So that just leaves you with... a couple of people's questions went unanswered on a forum.

An extremely confused summary

[shutdown -p now]

This is wrong on so many counts, I don't even know where to begin here...

First of all, this:

Three years ago, with much fanfare, Microsoft announced it would make some of the .Net libraries open source using the Microsoft Reference License

There has never been an announcement that .NET framework libraries will become Open Source. Indeed, the very name of the license - "reference license" - indicates that it's not Open Source! The source is available for reference, so that developers can see what's going on, debug it, etc. It cannot be modified or redistributed.

And nowhere in the original announcement, or in any other documentation for the feature, has it been claimed that this somehow constitutes Open Source. Microsoft releases some of its projects under OSI-approved OSS licenses, and labels those OSS, so it is aware of the difference. There is no desire to confuse anyone about the nature of OSS, which is precisely why the term "open source" is not used here, and other terms, such as "shared source" or "reference source", are used instead.

Since then Microsoft has reneged on its promise.

Source code for .NET 3.5 was made available under MRL, and it still remains available. Source code for .NET 4 RTM isn't there yet (but one for .NET 4 RC is).

So, what promise was reneged on?

The reference code site is dead

It's not dead, it just takes time to update it with a new code release. It has .NET 4 RC bits, and that RC came out on February 10 this year - that's a far cry from "dead". Yes, it doesn't have .NET 4 RTM yet - but that has been released on April 12, less than a month ago. Give it time.

No, it's not an open source project where you see the live trunk directly. It was never meant to or claimed to be that, either. If you expected that, then you either misunderstood the original announcement (in which case I hope this clears it up), or you're just trolling...

Oh, it's a kdawson story. Nevermind.

Re:.Net for Mono at your peril.

[shutdown -p now]

Can you explain what is the relevance of developing for Mono to TFA?

Re:And what happened to those who got fooled by th

[shutdown -p now]

No-one, because there was no "OSS move" to begin with. I suggest you read the linked pages (rather than the blatantly incorrect - in traditional kdawson's MS-basing style - summary), and try to find any mention of "open source" in any of them.

Re:... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word

[Hurricane78]

For the same reason that people who voted for a party that then did not hold a single promise, but did the worst things possible, will get voted again by the very same people, as soon as “the other party” is in power, and the lie-machine of pre-election promises has started again.

99.999% of all people are fucking stupid cattle!

come ooon

[unity100]

there was an 'os move'. 1-1.5 years ago. they had delivered various press releases and whatnot putting a friendly face to oss. made various moves at that time too. this was probably one of them.

Re:come ooon

[shutdown -p now]

there was an 'os move'. 1-1.5 years ago. they had delivered various press releases and whatnot putting a friendly face to oss. made various moves at that time too. this was probably one of them.

*sigh*

Yes, there was an "OSS move". Microsoft has open sourced some of its projects (e.g. ASP.NET MVC), acquired and developed some more while keeping them OSS (e.g. IronPython, IronRuby).

No, this wasn't "probably one of them".

My advice, that is applicable to any subject - if your answer contains a "probably", do some research before you post.

You are, of course, welcome to prove me wrong by providing a reference for some press release, blog post, or, really, anything coming out of Microsoft that somehow connected the .NET Framework reference source release to Open Source.

Re:One word

[dudpixel]

One word - KHTML.

have a look at webkit's history - it wasn't open sourced until years after Apple forked from KHTML.

Sure all is well now, but it wasn't the overwhelming support of open-source some may think.

ussual?

[hany]

So it's same like almost every FOSS project on Source Forge? :)

Re:... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word

[clone53421]

You forgot Access.

Software Rot?

[rakanishu]

"Well, I found this open source project that sounds right, but it looks like it's been dead since 2007."

What if the software was essentially done and works fine, or does software go bad faster than fruits and veggies left in the sun for a few hours?

open for contributions

[sgt scrub]

I thought the point of announcing open source bits of this and that was to prompt contributions by the open source community. Why contribute to something you've solely provided for the purpose of consumption?

Re:One word

[man1sh]

have a look at webkit's history - it wasn't open sourced until years after Apple forked from KHTML.

Then under what license was it released before Apple forked it? A proprietary license?

Re:One word

[dudpixel]

that's not the point.

Was Apple supporting KHTML? no.

Were they taking it and enhancing it for their own purposes? yes.

I'd suggest WebKit was open sourced because of the KHTML license but I admit I don't know the details well enough.

There is a difference between supporting FOSS and using FOSS in (or as the basis of) your own projects.

I'm not really that concerned if Apple dont support FOSS either, but if we're going to make claims, lets keep them truthful.