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Microsoft To Open Source .NET and Take It Cross-Platform
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today announced plans to open source .NET, the company's software framework that primarily runs on Windows, and release it on GitHub. Furthermore, Microsoft also unveiled plans to take .NET cross-platform by targeting both Mac OS X and Linux. In the next release, Microsoft plans to open source the entire .NET server stack, from ASP.NET 5 down to the Common Language Runtime and Base Class Libraries. The company will let developers build .NET cloud applications on multiple platforms; it is promising future support of the .NET Core server runtime and framework for Mac and Linux. Microsoft is also making Visual Studio free for small teams.
Yeah, they're just quaking their boots for the 3% Apple market and 0.8% Linux share.
Actually, yes, they are. The Mac OS X market is growing on the desktop and the Linux server market has been kicking ass for some time now. Microsoft is losing developers for Windows and they have recently gone through some pretty massive layoffs in the last five years, more than 23,000 employees. They are losing ground in the console wars with the Xbox One, and are struggling to keep their Nokia purchase from tanking. Add to that the abysmal Windows 8 reception and the Surface fiasco that is just starting to show some rays of hope for that device and you have a tech company on a significant downward slide. Also note how most of the older employees are cashing out and going on to other projects. Signs that the ship is going down!
If they're not collectively quaking in their boots, they ought to be!
AFAIK both Bill Gates and Steve Balmer don't control Microsoft anymore.
This is a new Microsoft with a new CEO, so we should at least give them the benefit of the doubt.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Microsoft still has dominance (monopoly) of desktop OS and office software. They still have incompatible office formats. They still corrupt international standards organizations. They still have the mindset of "Microsoft way or the highway". They still bundle their OS with most computers and vendors that want to sell computers without Windows still get in trouble. They still screw up their mobile phone partners.
They are still as evil as they used to be. They missed the boat with search/internet services and mobile- so they have a weeker position now. And now we have other evil companies like Apple and Google, and other evil organizations like NSA and GCHQ that affect the internet and computing world. But given emergence of new evils and reduction of power of Microsoft does not make them less evil.
--Coder
I've spent years using both Java and C# professionally. C# wins hands down. For many years before Sun's demise the languages would leapfrog one another in functionality, but Java stopped keeping up a couple years before Sun went down. Java 8 is about where C# was 5 years ago now. It's night and day.
The real question for MS is: what about phones? MS has partnered to get mobile cross-platform C# working with Mono, but it's not free if you want VS integration. Being able to write and test on the PC and then run on any phone or tablet (well, at least modern ones) is a big deal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No kidding. An open sourced .NET should get praise rather than grumpy old complaining. Some spend years complaining and then when a company takes a step in the right direction they deride it. Sure it is a decade overdue, but they did it.