Microsoft's .NET Foundation and open sourcing .NET
- Inicie sesión o regístrese para enviar comentarios
I caught this the other day about Microsoft's .NET Foundation to make .NET and C# more open by releasing many components under the Apache license. Here's from their home page at http://www.dotnetfoundation.org:
"Announced at the Build 2014 conference, the .NET Foundation was created as an independent forum to foster open development and collaboration around the growing collection of open source technologies for .NET. It will strengthen the future of the .NET ecosystem, providing a forum that promotes openness, rapid innovation and community participation by commercial and community developers.
The .NET Foundation includes community leaders such as Miguel de Icaza (Xamarin), Laurent Bugnion (IdentityMine), Niels Hartvig (Umbraco), Nigel Sampson (Compiled Experience), Anthony van der Hoorn (Glimpse) and Paul Betts. In the upcoming months, the .NET Foundation will be inviting many companies and community leaders to join the foundation, including its Board of Directors and will then finalize its operational details, including governance models for its open source initiatives, membership structure and industry and community engagement."
There's also a story at http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/microsoft-launches-net-foundation-to-foster-the-net-open-source-ecosystem/ detailing it. Your thoughts/suggestions? I know some people like C# as a language, but it was pretty locked down to Microsoft platforms.
Some time again I read this article about Software Patents by Richard Stallman
https://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
Open Source never refers to freedom
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
The business guys may say "open source" but as long as this is released under the Apache 2.0 license (which is both free software and open source), then the end result should be the same: https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2
"The business guys may say "open source" but as long as this is released under the Apache 2.0 license (which is both free software and open source), then the end result should be the same: https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2"
Indeed - It's a free software license regardless of the motivations/beliefs/etc of the people that made the software and their reasons for publishing it. However, megurineturilli wasn't talking of that but other issues which your reply totally glossed over.
This would be a good thing to listen to and is more on the topic that megurineturilli is addressing. Hopefully it will help:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2009/jul/07/0x11/
That was a pretty good podcast about the state of C# and does bring some excellent points. I personally like to work with open languages for server side programming (PHP, Python, JavaScript with Node.js) and never dabbled in Java or C# no matter how "hot" those languages are or how they are required by many job recruiters.
According to http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Java_and_patents#OpenJDK:_the_GPLv2_Java_from_Oracle, OpenJDK is safe to use because of the GPLv2 license. :)
Coder Radio did a perspective on .NET being opened up: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/54707/ms-gadget-2-0-cr-96/ with an Ogg file available of course:
"Microsoft shocks the developer community by open sourcing some of their crown .Net jewels. Mike and Chris discuss the ramifications for Java, and the overall strategy Microsoft could be shifting too. Plus why the return of the Start Menu is a massive middle finger to devs, and other interesting bits from Build 2014."
Is it possible to build and run .NET applications using only free
software? It doesn't sound like it:
http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/028031/dotnetfoundation-620x496.png
Move along, nothing to see here...
Andrew.
I don't get what you are trying to show with that image. Those seem like a list of existing technologies which may or may not be open now. The hope with the foundation is that we can finally use free software to build and deploy without worry.
t3g wrote:
> I don't get what you are trying to show with that image. Those seem
> like a list of existing technologies which may or may not be open
> now. The hope with the foundation is that we can finally use free
> software to build and deploy without worry.
The image doesn't mention the .NET runtime at all, or anything that
would enable end-users to run a .NET application with only free software.
Microsoft hasn't committed to software freedom in relation to .NET or
anything else.
The optimistic side of me suggests that maybe .NET could become like
Java in the future, in the sense that most users will be running a
proprietary runtime on Windows (like the version of Java that Oracle
distributes) but perhaps it will be possible to run some .NET programs
in freedom (like OpenJDK).
The pessimistic side of me says that Microsoft will "open source" some
of their compiler code for pragmatic reasons - to attract developers,
developers, developers - and end-users will still need to run
proprietary software for 99.9% of .NET applications, except for the few
applications that are specifically programmed to run on Mono.
But that is mere speculation. At the moment I think the contribution is
fairly meaningless for the free software community.
Andrew.
- Inicie sesión o regístrese para enviar comentarios