Six takeaways from Microsoft's open sourcing of .NET. Do you agree?

name at domain wrote:
> This story was posted a while back, but here you go:
> http://www.zdnet.com/six-takeaways-from-microsofts-open-sourcing-of-net-7000035878/
>
>
> Do you agree with most of this or is it bullshit?

The ZDnet article by Joe McKendrick stakes out the allowable range of
debate in the second paragraph:

> The move was warmly received across the IT community, which often has
> been skeptical of Microsoft's intentions. (Well, with the possible
> exception of my good friend Adrian Bridgwater, who suggests the
> company's open source move was only to solidify its world
> domination.)

and links to
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianbridgwater/2014/11/16/microsofts-new-democracy-springtime-for-open-source-or-a-deeper-play-for-world-domination/print/
an article by Adrian Bridgwater. In keeping with corporate news, both
ends deceive by failing to stake out positions too different from one
another while purporting to be in opposition.

Both articles argue their points in terms of "openness" -- a term that
is defined to minimize freedom-talk. The Open Source movement was formed
over a decade after the Free Software movement. The Open Source movement
aims to speak to business by co-opting Free Software into a message
where freedom-talk is dropped and the software licensing differences are
ignored[1]. Gone is the distinction of copyleft, which serves to
reinforce user's software freedom in derivative works. Nowhere do you
see licenses critiqued according to how well they preserve your freedom
to incorporate the software without falling into a patent trap. Instead
with the Open Source Initiative (the bulwark of the Open Source
movement) one gets a catalog of licenses presented as if they're roughly
equivalent to one another. Drawing any real distinction among them, like
the Free Software Foundation does, would only serve to reinforce the
notion the Open Source movement was built to hide -- software freedom. A
proper defense of a computer user's software freedoms requires careful
consideration and clear distinctions about which licenses do what.

The same lack of software freedom-based consideration pervades both of
these .NET advertisements -- neither article criticizes Microsoft too
strongly. McKendrick echoes long-time marketing speak about how
Microsoft's .NET code will spur "innovation", promote "choices" for
developers, and more without asking critical questions like why
innovation would be a good goal to have in itself, or what if some of
the choices are patent traps? While Bridgwater goes on about
interoperability and extensibility, he dares not mention that Microsoft
holds patents that make it very unwise to reuse any of the .NET code
Microsoft just published.

A true critique would point out how dangerous it is to base anything on
.NET as End Software Patents makes clear in
http://endsoftpatents.org/2014/11/ms-net/ with regard to Microsoft's
"personal promise" covering the .NET code:

> [Y]ou’re only protected if you’re distributing the code "as part of
> either a .NET Runtime or as part of any application designed to run
> on a .NET Runtime". So if you add any of the code to another project,
> then you lose protection and MS reserves the right to sue you or ask
> for royalties

and

> the protection only applies to a "compliant implementation" of .NET.
> So if you want to remove some parts and make a streamlined framework
> for embedded devices, then your implementation won’t be compliant and
> the protection doesn’t apply to you.

tell the tale of why the advice Free Software Foundation Executive
Director John Sullivan wrote in 2009 in
https://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono still applies:

> We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C#
> implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should
> discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should
> not include C# implementations in the default installation of
> GNU/Linux distributions or in their principal ways of installing
> GNOME, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications
> rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.

How is this different from the GNU GPL v3 (an actual license)? Again,
End Software Patents:

> Code distributed under the GNU GPLv3, comes with a patent grant which
> basically says the contributors can’t use their patents against the
> users for exercising the freedoms granted in the licence.

followed by a quote from GNU GPL v3 section 11.

We are wise to avoid .NET dependencies (including C# and .NET
applications) and wise to never recommending .NET software to others
because that would help Microsoft find targets for patent litigation.

[1] See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for
more on this point.