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Microsoft To Open Source Chakra, the JavaScript Engine In Its Edge Browser (windows.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft announced today that it will soon open source the "Chakra" JavaScript engine used inside its Edge browser and Internet Explorer. The company plans to publish the code on its GitHub page in January. "Microsoft is calling the version it's open sourcing ChakraCore. This is the complete JavaScript engine—the parser, the interpreter, the just-in-time compiler, and the garbage collector along with the API used to embed the engine into applications (as used in Edge). This will have the same performance and capabilities, including asm.js and SIMD support, as well as cutting-edge support for new ECMAScript 2015 language features like the version found in Microsoft's Windows 10 browser." While it'll be Windows-only code to start, they plan on taking it cross-platform just as they did with .NET. "Microsoft intends to run ChakraCore's development as a proper community project. The company says that Intel and AMD have already expressed interest in contributing, and others are sure to join them."
I think you have it the other way around. People do use Firefox because they like it, and people are complaining and leaving Firefox because Mozilla keeps changing it away from the browser they like. Nobody has to use Firefox, and pretty much the only people who do use it because it's the browser that's closest to Firefox 3.x in UI and functionality (if you customize it.)
Edge isn't going to change that. Edge is not Firefox 3.x, it's not meant to be, and it'll probably never look like that. Firefox will probably disappear into irrelevance within the next two years, but that's 100% on Mozilla, and 0% on any open source initiatives Microsoft might have.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Here is the license to the open source .NET runtime: https://github.com/dotnet/core.... And here is the license to the open source framework library: https://github.com/dotnet/core....
Both are MIT licenses. The C#/VB compilers are released under an Apache license: https://github.com/dotnet/rosl...
Does this sort of thing really get non-MS employees to contribute to the project? Or is it just a matter of opening the source so people can poke through it for the sake of their own enlightenment? If I were looking for a open source project to contribute my time and effort, I can't imagine that what amounts to a wholly Microsoft project would pull me in.
C# is OSS on GitHub has lots of non-MS contributors. If you add together the non-MS contributors to the compiler, the standard libraries, and the runtime, they add up to about twice that of node.js. See here, particularly the graph on slide 11:
http://www.slideshare.net/Kase...
The author of that deck gave me a more recent version of that slide for a talk I gave recently at QCon (I'm on the C# team), on slide 21: https://qconsf.com/system/file...
I think the general story is (1) Microsoft came late to the OSS game so we're working extra hard at being extra open to make up for lost time, e.g. the C# standard library team hold their weekly API design review meetings live online and anyone can join in (and the recordings are kept so that GitHub issues can link to the exact moment in the meeting when the issue is discussed). (2) There seriously are a heck of a lot of C# developers out there in the world, lots of them passionate about the language they use day-in and day-out, so contributing comes naturally. (3) C# has a lot of credibility, e.g. amongst folks who think of it as "java done right", e.g. for its introduction of LINQ and more recently async/await, so you do earn serious geek cred by contributing to C#. (4) Lots of people in Microsoft shops have been itching to get into OSS, and previously had a hard time convincing their bosses to let them, but now they can show that Microsoft does it so it must be okay. A weird thought process I know coming from a Linux background, but it's nevertheless how a lot of bosses in a lot of Microsoft shops think.
I believe that TypeScript, another OSS Microsoft project, has a huge number of non-MS contributors too. Will Chakra get the same? No idea! But I wouldn't be surprised.