Open Source Software Seeping Into the .NET Developer World

dp619 writes "In an interview, Microsoft Regional Director Patrick Hynds says that avoidance of open source components by a large part of the .NET developer population is abating. '...While some may still steer clear of the GPL, there are dozens of FOSS licenses that are compatible with Windows developers and their customers,' he said. Hynds cites NuGet, an open source package management system was originally built by Microsoft and now an Outercurve Foundation project, as an example of FOSS libraries that .NET developer are adopting for their applications. Microsoft itself has embraced open source — to a point. It has partnered with Hortonworks for a Windows port of Hadoop, allowed Linux to run on Windows Azure, and is itself a Hadoop user."

Comments

Get in on the action?

[mystikkman]

Why should Google and Apple be the only ones that make gobs of money leveraging Open Source? Microsoft wants to join the party.

Re:Get in on the action?

[shutdown -p now]

Microsoft is not quite a single monolithic entity, and different product units can and do have very different perspectives on FOSS. Developer division, in particular, is pretty much forced to deal with it, just because of the wide acceptance of it in the customer base today. Which is precisely why most FOSS you see coming out of MS does come from DevDiv, and a good chunk of that are various frameworks (e.g. ASP.NET MVC or Entity Framework). It's also catching on somewhat for other products - Python Tools for Visual Studio is one prominent example there, and is probably a better example of what a FOSS MS project should really be, since it goes beyond just publishing the code (under Apache license), and also takes external contributions.

(disclaimer: I am a developer on the Python Tools team, so you may I assume that I am correspondingly biased)

The other part of the company that has strong market pressure to be FOSS-friendly is Azure. If you want to compete with AWS and Google, you have let customers run things other than the usual 100% MS .NET/IIS/Windows stack, in various combinations - at the very least, people need Java and PHP (and more exotic stuff like Python and Node.js) for apps, and many also want Apache (or other server) rather than IIS, and Linux rather than Windows. Then they want the cloud service (storage etc) APIs to be available in those languages in client apps, as well.

On the other hand, I would be surprised to see a FOSS version of Windows or Office anytime soon - simply because most people buying and using it don't really care one way or another, so there's no incentive to strongly consider it.

Re:Get in on the action?

[Dr_Barnowl]

Which is of course a lie. Just because I have GPL software on my Windows machine, does not mean I have to make any software I write open source.

I don't even have to make it so if I compile a C program with the gcc - a GPL compiler. It explicitly says this in the license.

The same applies to any GPL program - using it does not make the works you create with it GPL as well.

Just a massive bit of FUD. Ballmer should be thankful that there have been open-source developers writing programs that work on Windows, increasing the value of his platform at no cost to his corporation.

Re:.NET Developers Have Long Favored Open Source

[shutdown -p now]

Whatever their desires may be, programming for a platform where open source has been intentionally denied even the possibility of existence and calling it open source

In what sense open source has been "intentionally denied even the possibility of existence" on .NET or Windows?

If you want to contribute to mankind you need to do it in a form that can be legally parsed by newcomers without paying licensing fees.

You mean, like Mono?