Earlier this year, Microsoft open sourced a big chunk of .NET, publishing its new compiler, Roslyn, and many .NET libraries under the Apache license. Today, the company took that same open sourcing effort a great deal further. Microsoft announced that its full server .NET stack, including the just-in-time compiler and runtime and the core class libraries that all .NET software depends on, will all be open sourced.
The code will be hosted on GitHub and published under a permissive MIT-style license.
With this release, Microsoft wants to make sure that the .NET stack is fully functional and production quality on both Linux and OS X. The company is working with the Mono community to make sure that this platform is "enterprise-ready."
Not sure I'd want a port of .NET but perhaps we'll see some improvements to WINE with this available codebase.
Additionally, Microsoft announced a partnership with Xamarin for Visual Studio 2015 with support for iOS, Android and Windows, allowing to use one tool for all. This will impact Xamarin tools as well, making easier to install them from Visual Studio.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Lagg on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:59AM
They're going to release some of .NET. None of the really useful parts from what I'm seeing either. The keyword here is "full server". Meaning "about half of what compromises .NET". Given the transparently shady wording of their press release I think people will be lucky to even get that half in its entirety.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:37AM
Yup. Any time there are these sorts of "open source" claims from M$, just wander over to TechRights and see what Roy Schestowitz has to say.
If there's any doubt, he'll set you straight.
.NET is NOT “Open Source”, But Microsoft’s Minions Shamelessly Openwash It Right Now [techrights.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @09:13AM
Even if they Open Sourced the complete code base, I'd still be suspicious. There may be patents covering that code base.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:22PM
I agree. It is a distraction from the real work of FOSS which extricates all from the world of proprietary software servitude.....
(Score: 1) by Rich on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:16AM
As I understood a diagram on one of the upstream sites, there will be two versions of .NET in the immediate future:
4.6, closed source, which includes WinForms and WPF
5.0 "core", open source (MIT/Apache, apparently plus patent promise), which does not include the above, but stuff that may be "Modern UI" related.
On my cursory read, I was not able to figure out how one would write desktop applications with the "newer" stuff, even on Windows. It seems to be pretty close to Mono in scope.
Further enlightenment, anyone?
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:33AM
Thanks, but no. I'm comfortable with OpenBox/LXDE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 13 2014, @03:00AM
https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/tree/master/src
(oh, wow. So many of them, such a comprehensive coverage of anything a developer would ever dream of!!!)
But, maybe others will follow, cause I fail to see how this could qualify as full server .NET stack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday November 13 2014, @04:25AM
See here [msdn.com] - a blog post by Immo Landwerth, program manager on the Base Class Libraries (BCL) team at Microsoft.
Specifically this diagram [msdn.com] says that (slowly, by 2015), the .NET core 5 will comprise of:
with a promise that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by ancientt on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:34AM
This post brought to you by Database Barbie
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:31AM
sed i/\.NET/systemd/
Still valid. That's live... Good tools can be used for bad purposes... But maybe it makes .NET vulnerable. Maybe it will also caught some bad disease one day, like .NET with systemd-extension ;-)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:36AM
The article seems to be talking about the shift to using the permissive MIT license as opposed to the Apache 2.0 license as though it were a good thing. With code from an organisation like Microsoft it's probably not. The Apache 2.0 license [apache.org] includes the famous 'patent treachery' clause:
Naturally, no clause like this is present in the Expat/MIT license [github.com]. Meaning Microsoft does not implicitly grant you any patent licenses for any patents that may be viable in any software they release which is so licensed, and they are free to sue you for patent infringement if they feel like it. You can't wave around section 3 if they do take you to court this time..
I know, it's been sixteen years or so since the Halloween Documents. Perhaps my perception of Microsoft ought to change, but even today I still hear Admiral Ackbar shouting in my ear...
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday November 13 2014, @04:10AM
And excellent point. My first reaction, before I even read the summary, was "okay, so what's the catch?"
The Halloween Documents may be old news, but their blatant corruption of the ISO standards process and other shenanigans related to the OOXML formats is still relatively recent. And offhand I can't think of a single example of *any* "community-minded" activity by Microsoft that hasn't been done under extreme legal duress and/or turned out to be a cynical plan to reinforce their monopoly. Maybe they're starting to turn over a new leaf, but given their long and "colorful" history I'm sure as hell not trusting them an inch. If they want me to believe in their good will then they can damn well bind themselves in such strong legal chains that they don't have the option of stabbing me in the back - anything less and I'm going to assume they're just waiting for a lucrative enough opportunity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday November 13 2014, @11:01AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 13 2014, @11:33AM
Besides, Android is proving that a big open source project can still be a PITA to adapt to your needs because it's too fast moving with incompatibilities between versions.
One would need to distinguish "free software for the sake of the user" from "free software because the market won't take anything else" projects.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by jbernardo on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:53AM
There is one interesting thing that I haven't seen fully discussed yet - the extent of the involvement of xamarin in this "multi-platform" .net. As already mentioned, the included components seem to be those already in mono. Oh well, the headline "Microsoft open-sources .net" probably sounds a lot better than "Icaza really was working for Microsoft all along", which is what we would get if Microsoft just endorsed mono.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @05:58PM
Or it was Microsoft thinking: "Mono now has its own implementations of these components anyway, so there's no longer any advantage in keeping them closed; thus let's pretend we are friendly by making our source to those components open, while keeping closed everything for which there is still no viable alternative."
(Score: 2) by jbernardo on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:57AM
I can't wait to see what will be the systemd cult approach:
Rewrite systemd in .net; or
Integrate .net in systemd, make it bit code incompatible with Microsoft's version, and make Gnome a hard dependency, finally looping the dependency he'll.
(Score: 3, Funny) by novak on Thursday November 13 2014, @03:31AM
I'm so excited you asked! There's so much you can do with .NET:
*) It's a lot easier to write than shell, especially if you restrict yourself to .sh
*) Microsoft supplies Visual Studio for easy debugging of .NET. Have fun using vim to edit your shell scripts, loser!
*) JIT means superior performance, so we can get even faster boot times.
Long story short, its just reinvented sysVinit, except all your init scripts are now .NET.
This is clearly a superior technical solution so if you disagree it's because you are to stupid to understand the beauty of .NET.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @04:37PM
That can only be a temporary solution. Clearly we must integrate a .NET interpreter directly in the kernel. After all, you surely want to write systemd-enabled device drivers in .NET, don't you? ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @03:57AM
They couldn't ditch Windows and move to BSD as fast as Apple did, but ma-a-ybe it's possible as a five year plan. BSD with MS proprietary modifications (same as Apple) and .NET with Winforms running on top.
Then they can get rid of all the MS-DOS/16-bit Windows/COM/OLE/MFC/6000+ APIs (and that was 15 years ago)/IE built into the OS cruft, once and for all. All those ugly "Jeffrey Richter" APIs (Richter wrote several editions of the MS Press explaining them) could be deprecated during the course of a single press conference given by Satya Nadella.
They would have to port MS Office, which I think still pretty much uses Windows GDI instead of Winforms, but with Moore's Law that can probably change.
Heck, they can even have pathnames with forward slash delimiters instead of backslashes!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:05PM
Actually, MS-DOS and Windows always supported forward-slash pathnames in API calls. The original COMMAND.COM shell used forward-slash for options as a backwards-compatibility hack for the older CP/M. So the MS-DOS file-system APIs accepted backslashes in order to let people type paths into the shell. An ugly hack that caused a lot of problems. Unfortunately, backslash is an escape character in C and derived languages, so people would program paths like "C:\new\folder" and get surprised. The funny thing is they didn't need to, because unless you're interacting with the COMMAND.COM shell, you can use forward slashes.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:23PM
and of course, when AT&T released the getopt source code (on usenet in 83 or so?) a lot of people were mad they standardized on `-' for the flag character instead of `+' or something else. The original GNU getopt_long used `+' for long arguments (instead of `--' as is now standard).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @05:46PM
Indeed, there was even a time where you could tell DOS that you'd want "-" as command line switch. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 14 2014, @02:37PM
Seems like this isn't the first story I've seen recently about Microsoft embracing Linux a bit more. Could be the usual EEE, but I'm wondering if it might be a bit more than that. More and more apps moving to the web, more and more focus on mobile where MS is far behind, a few spectacular failures in Windows itself recently (ie, Vista and 8), the constant improvements to Linux, including Steambox and all of that...Microsoft might be worried about losing the OS market entirely. Or the desktop OS space becoming less and less relevant (and therefore less valuable -- we've already seen movement towards and rumors of cheap or even free Windows editions). So maybe they're trying to port their stuff while they still have a chance to use Windows' dominance to get customers. Perhaps they want to ensure there's still a market for .Net even if they lose Windows entirely.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday November 13 2014, @05:09AM
El Reg has this interview with Miguel de Icaza [theregister.co.uk] on this topic as well as another article [theregister.co.uk] on this topic.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by jbernardo on Thursday November 13 2014, @05:48AM
Thank you, the comments by dogged on the first article and the number of upvotes reminded me of why I deleted my account there this year.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:26AM
Ah, here's another article [linux.com] I just found, referenced on that other news site which we do not mention here. (Yes, I do go there occasionally so bite me.)
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @05:40AM
Too bad I already rewrote all my .NET shit in JavaScript years ago.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday November 13 2014, @06:19AM
Has anyone, of reliable repute, seen Miguel and Lennart in the same place at the same time? I am just curious.
(Score: 1) by Wrong Turn Ahead on Thursday November 13 2014, @06:24AM
Can someone please briefly explain why Mono or .Net would be desired on a Linux server? How is it superior, exactly? Also, I thought the community had gone anti-Mono a couple years back, have things changed since then? Not troll'n, I'm genuinely asking...
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:29AM
Well, as someone who has played around with .Net and C# a bit, all I can say is that C# is a very cool language, and this an assessment from someone who loves Java and is highly prejudiced again M$ products. LINQ, perhaps, is its best feature once you learn to stomach it. Part of me prefers the SQL queries via JDBC in the Java world but LINQ has a lot of appeal, especially because it works with things other than just relational databases.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Common Joe on Thursday November 13 2014, @09:17AM
I like C# as a language... especially the older syntax around version 2 or 3.0. I never liked LINQ. It encourages use of variables defined at runtime instead of compile time, it's syntax is different from "standard" SQL, and it seems to violate the basic ideas of object oriented programming. (At least as I visualize "object oriented" in my mind. I'm sure others have a different opinion.) Personally, one of the strengths of .NET is that it can use different languages and mush them all together. I'm surprised LINQ wasn't separated as a completely separate language. I guess the idea was to keep the code written to a minimum, but I feel it makes C# too mushy. I think there are better ways to do it.
I just went to a talk recently about the up and coming stuff in the next version of C# and, for the most part, I see extra syntax being given to C# that will only make code harder to maintain. I felt this way for a couple of versions. They are trying to make the language be able to do the same thing several different ways. Visual Basic did that and I feel it leads to buggy code when someone tries to update code during maintenance. How can everyone know all of the syntax of a particular language these days -- especially someone who is learning the language? Even if they are a good programmer, they might misinterpret the subtleties of the compressed code. There are times I look at the "new syntax features" of C# and think it's beginning to look like the code obfuscation contest put out by the C guys.
FYI: I like C#. I like Java. I don't like Microsoft.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @09:17AM
Ah, you love Java? I don't. So I guess I won't love C# either, right?
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday November 13 2014, @10:34AM
Not at all - I don't love Java, in fact I gradually grew to dislike it over a number of years and since Oracle took over and started bundling malware inside Java security updates, I am heading towards actively hating it. C# is much better, in a lot of ways, and in fact I have grown to like it (over the same time period that I have grown to hate Java).
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday November 13 2014, @09:03AM
When writing everyday business applications, it is easier than dealing with the hassles of C or C++. Java also falls into this category. There are also plenty of C# and Java programmers to draw from if you're looking to replace a missing man on the team or hire someone new. C# and Java have more resources thrown at them than most other languages. It's easier to get hired for C# or Java than most other languages. Both C# and Java have their problems, no doubt. No language is perfect. Before anyone blasts me with the problems C# has, I know it has problems. I was merely answering the question.
Personally, I also like the idea of crossing O.S. lines between Linux and Windows. Perfect? Definitely not. Better than a lot of other stuff out there, though. Does it open you up for potential legal hassle in the future? Both C# and Java do, yes. At this point, I don't think it matters anymore which language is picked to work in, though. All of them are going to be a potential problem in the future -- either because of the language or the dependencies that the language(s) require no matter what O.S. it is on.
Merely my opinion and 2 cents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:59PM
Desktop GUI development with C#, Winforms and Visual Studio is a joy. There is nothing remotely like that in the Linux world.
(Score: 1) by Refugee from beyond on Thursday November 13 2014, @06:46PM
What about using it? *cough*
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:17PM
I've been pondering this development since the news broke, and I honestly don't know what to think.
- MS is giving us a drive train without the chassis, tires, or engine. The whole MS stack is optimized for SQL Server, and I haven't used .NET enough to know if it works with any other database. Also, I don't know if they're open-sourcing their whole ASP.NET stuff. Without the engine (SQL Server) and the chassis (the presentation-level stuff), .NET is a systems programming environment and Linux has enough of those already. You're also not getting Win32/Win64, just the runtime virtual machine, so I don't know how much of code is actually going to be portable. (With database code, you can plug in your own drivers for LINQ, but how many Linux databases would have that kind of thing available? I don't know, because it never occurred to me to look. I know IBM ported or reimplemented ODBC on Linux.)
- ASP.NET is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. I read about it once, saw "run at server", and went back to J2EE. They have a parallel universe of their own MVC and ORM (the Entity Framework) which seems to appeal to people who want their IDE to think for them. If ASP.NET was available for Linux, well, anyone who wanted to use ASP.NET would want to use Windows. That kind of developer would not want to be near Linux. I don't see body shops grinding out code wanting to suddenly switch to Linux. I don't see Linux people wanting to learn ASP.NET. The inefficient design of ASP.NET ought to bother anyone who is comfortable with Linux.
- I've always admired Anders Heidelberg (how do you spell his last name again?) who has a way of developing elegant languages like Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and C#. Java is just one hack after another piled on top until it's about to collapse under its own weight. C#, by comparison, seems elegant and well designed.
Is this a win or a loss? I have no idea.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nicdoye on Friday November 14 2014, @12:55PM
C# is a better version of Java. Sun should have added many of C#'s features ages ago.
LINQ, Functional programming (had it for ages - better than Java 8's verbose awfulness) http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/375166/Functional-programming-in-Csharp [codeproject.com], Properties, etc., etc. are all awesome.
I've used C# to talk to Greenplum/PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle (and obvs. SQL Server). I've never used the IDE to do schema design.
Hibernate fans (shudder ;-) ) can use NHibernate, there's Log4Net and NLog to replace Log4J, the list goes on.
ASP.NET MVC is almost as good as Spring MVC. If you like modern lean stacks like Ruby's Sinatra or Node's Express, there's NancyFX.
Package management using NuGet is pretty awesome. I don't know if it works completely as well as say Maven, but Maven in itself is kind of nasty.
Dependency Injection via the long established Castle container http://www.castleproject.org/ [castleproject.org], Microsoft Unity http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647202 [microsoft.com], and others is just as good as in the various Java implementations. (A Spring expert may jump in here and point out that Spring's ecosystem is massive compared with the C# versions - I've never had the need to use all of Spring, and the sheer size of the number of methods actually puts me off).
VisualStudio is a seriously good IDE, and I'm glad there's a Community edition, now (I've been forced to use Express editions most of the time).
At this point, I'll say that Groovy (and JRuby) for the JVM are awesome, too, but open sourcing and cross-platforming C#/.NET is probably one of the most significant IT events of the last 20 years. (Unless no one ends up using it).
I'm a UNIX person through and through, but I have to use .NET for one application and I've come to love it.
I code because I can