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Microsoft Releases .NET Under MIT License

posted by n1 on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-desperate-moves dept.

An Anonymous Coward and Kunasou writes with an article from Ars Technica:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:36AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:36AM (#115387) Journal

    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:

    3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

    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...

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday November 13 2014, @04:10AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday November 13 2014, @04:10AM (#115406)

    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

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday November 13 2014, @11:01AM (#115499) Journal
    If your attention span is big enough to look in two files, you'll see that the parts under an MIT license contains a copyright license in one file (MIT) and a patent grant in another.
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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 13 2014, @11:33AM

    by Bot (3902) on Thursday November 13 2014, @11:33AM (#115504) Journal

    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.

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