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: 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."