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They also announced as part of this that they are putting a large swatch of their .NET Source code under Apache 2 and accepting pull requests. Folks, this is a

They also announced as part of this that they are putting a large swatch of their .NET Source code under Apache 2 and accepting pull requests. Folks, this is a very big deal for Microsoft. Who would have imagined this 10 years ago? Here is an image that shows what they are putting into the community https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkT9oBcCQAAHIAV.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkT9oBcCQAAHIAV.jpg:large

msteinert 13y ago
Thanks for the link! It looks like the same information is also here: http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/ http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/
sirkneeland 13y ago
Who would have imagined it 5 years ago?
- cwyers 13y ago
  Who would have imagined it five months ago?
  - ygra 13y ago
    They open-sourced a lot of things related to .NET in the recent years. That Roslyn was to join those things doesn't exactly come as a surprise. It's still welcome, though.
    - pionar 13y ago
      When they first started talking about Roslyn a couple of years ago, the plan was always to open-source it, when they felt good about the quality.
  - yulaow 13y ago
    At that moment they already released part of .NET, asp.net and azure. I think you wanted to say that the "change" was made only thanks to the exit of Ballmer, but I think that's an exaggeration.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > I think you wanted to say that the "change" was made only thanks to the exit of Ballmer, but I think that's an exaggeration. I think it'd probably be more accurate to say that these particular changes are symptoms of the same corporate change of direction that the change of CEO was, not that the change of CEO specifically resulted in these releases.
  - nbevans 13y ago
    Quite a lot of people actually. These moves have been on the cards for years. Just waiting now for the next big move in the coming months of when they acquire Xamarin.
    - svas 13y ago
      I was hoping there would be an announcement at Build that they had acquired Xamarin, but that didn't happen. All that was mentioned was that they were a partner that they were working with. Still a possibility in the future though. The open sourcing of Roslyn can only mean good things for Xamarin.
      - cwyers 13y ago
        Microsoft clearly is involving Xamarin in this announcement -- parts of Xamarin are going into the same dot net Foundation that's in charge of this, and de Icaza was on stage for part of this. It may be best for Microsoft at this point if they support and involve Xamarin without buying it outright, people who want to use Xamarin with MS tooling can take advantage of Visual Studio integration, people who are wary of Microsoft can use Xamarin Studio and Mono and never officially touch Microsoft's stack while still becoming part of their ecosystem.
        CCs 13y ago
        How this affects the (pretty high) Xamarin prices? https://store.xamarin.com/ https://store.xamarin.com/
  - cwyers 13y ago
    yulaow, clearly the lead-time on a lot of this stuff is longer than Ballmer's been gone, so yeah, not fair to put all this on his departure. "Five months" was a pithy play off "five years," nothing more or less than that.
    - louthy 13y ago
      Does it really take that long to make a decision to open source something? Perhaps for a large company it does, I dunno. The projects themselves may have been in development for a long time (this is definitely true of Roslyn), but that doesn't mean they were always going to be open sourced.
      - cwyers 13y ago
        They announced a Foundation with members outside of Microsoft, in charge of a mix of their code and code from Xamarin. So you need to coordinate all of that. You also probably need to have lawyers review all the code and make sure that MS has the rights to everything included so they can do this, someone to scrub all the comments to make sure developers didn't throw in something embarrassing or worse, you need to set up workflows for reviewing community bug reports and patches... this isn't something you can do in an afternoon.
        louthy 13y ago
        > this isn't something you can do in an afternoon. How about in 5 months? Don't get me wrong I'm not falling on either side of this argument, but I think it seems at least slightly plausible that this process could have been initiated or at least accelerated by the new CEO.
  - bunderbunder 13y ago
    ASP.NET went open source 2 years and a few days ago. Since at least that long ago, things have pretty steadily been heading in this direction. Only reason we haven't seen things more along any more quickly is that companies this size just don't move that fast.
Pxtl 13y ago
... as awesome as this is, I'm gonna be That Guy: No WPF?
- keithwarren 13y ago
  WPF is more or less owned by the Windows team. This is all stuff under Scott Guthrie's control
  - vtbassmatt 13y ago
    Pedantic: From the job posting that a sibling comment linked, the display tech appears to be under OSG. That means it's actually under Terry Myerson, not Scott Guthrie.
- Aaronontheweb 13y ago
  WPF just got some love a few minutes ago - they've got plans for a new release of it by the sound of things.
  - beagle3 13y ago
    I have a few WPF 4 bugs that were marked "fix in next version" 3-4 years ago, and then it was announced that there is no next version - i'm in the process of moving off WPF and this newfound love is not going to change anything.
    - _random_ 13y ago
      Yes. Good luck to Microsoft trying to be relevant in HTML5 space.
    - bananas 13y ago
      Similar problem with IE for me. I raised a case with gold partner support when IE9 came out as it broke ClickOnce download prompting. Been bouncing back and forth between framework and IE teams ever since. Result: we now have to ship a .reg file to our clients before we can launch our shit via ClickOnce. That's only 2000 people we now have to hand hold through this.....
baldfat 13y ago
Once again the whole KILL MONO FUD was the actions of the Open Source Community in the last 5 years. I never understood how in the world they got this is a trap from everything that was happening. I don't agree with RMS many times but in this one way he was 100% wrong when he targeted mono.
- acqq 13y ago
  Microsoft would never make the moves it does now if not for being scared of becoming less relevant. Until they really make free enough licenses not only for the core stuff but for the crucial libraries nobody can expect to be off-the-hook of the traditional lock-in. And even if they do all that, it doesn't mean anybody was "wrong" only that the conditions are changing and allow reconsideration.
- sparkie 13y ago
  Microsoft originally only released a specification for V.2 of C# and the Common Language Runtime (ECMA-334 and ECMA-335) - attached to it a promise that they would not sue, iff the framework was "implemented in whole" - which was very vague in that it didn't specify what could be included or omitted in order to make it compatible with other platforms. The clause was obviously added to prevent fragmentation of the platform though - ensuring that it stayed compatible with MS's product, and thus they'd continue to hold control over it. C# 2.0 is nearly a decade old now - and mono certainly hasn't limited itself to it. Absolutely none of C# 3, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5 was ever released as an open specification or as open source software until now - yet these are the versions mono and everyone was using. So the "MONO FUD" was never actually FUD, it was legitimate concerns about the lack of openness of the technology. Those are no longer concerns (about this release version) - and we can be glad that RMS et al were "wrong" about this one (When they were in fact, absolutely right at the time.)
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  I get pretty tired of writing a bunch of open-source C# code and getting flack for it. I'm glad there's finally no foothold left for the Mono FUD crowd.
- bambam12897 13y ago
caycep 13y ago
signs of the new Satya Nadella era?
- ygra 13y ago
  All this started long ago. Roslyn has been in development for a few years and that was still under Ballmer's leadership. Also many of the other things they're unveiling and open-sourcing now started way before Nadella took over as CEO. But my guess would be that Ballmer stepping down was sort of symbolic in this regard. With a new CEO it looks more like a "new Microsoft" doing all these things.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - dkuntz2 13y ago
    Just because they were working on it before doesn't mean that the plan at the time was to open-source those things...
    - untaken 13y ago
      They couldn't have done it that fast. They just couldn't do it while Ballmer was there - not after his anti-OSS rants. And he knew it.
leoc 13y ago
Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).
- MagerValp 13y ago
  I don't think it's particularly fair to lump Apple with the rest since 14 years later [1] the core OS is still open source [2], and they're actively working on several high profile open source projects (e.g. Webkit, CUPS, and clang). They're not exactly irrelevant either. [1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Dar... [2] http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    Given that all of those are already open sourced, do you know how bad it would look to close source them now? Especially Webkit/KHTML - that would be a PR disaster. I don't keep track of what Apple does - have they open sourced anything within the last few years? If not, I think they fit right in with the other companies.
pera 13y ago
> Who would have imagined this 10 years ago? well, Microsoft used to say that open source software was anti-american, cancer, communist, anti-competitive, etc... yup I think they changed a bit
drawkbox 13y ago
Big fan of the way Nadella is starting out, Microsoft may reverse the polarity of developers from disengaging back to attracting to Microsoft if they keep this up.
Iv 13y ago
Dumb question: is that the real deal? I see a lot of items, but I don't know how they relate to typical uses of .Net. So I guess my question is more for .Net specialists: With the code released, can you: - Run a ASP.Net web server? - Run a classic C# .Net project better than with Mono?

msteinert 13y ago

Thanks for the link! It looks like the same information is also here: http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/ http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/

sirkneeland 13y ago

Who would have imagined it 5 years ago?

cwyers 13y ago
Who would have imagined it five months ago?
- ygra 13y ago
  They open-sourced a lot of things related to .NET in the recent years. That Roslyn was to join those things doesn't exactly come as a surprise. It's still welcome, though.
  - pionar 13y ago
    When they first started talking about Roslyn a couple of years ago, the plan was always to open-source it, when they felt good about the quality.
- yulaow 13y ago
  At that moment they already released part of .NET, asp.net and azure. I think you wanted to say that the "change" was made only thanks to the exit of Ballmer, but I think that's an exaggeration.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > I think you wanted to say that the "change" was made only thanks to the exit of Ballmer, but I think that's an exaggeration. I think it'd probably be more accurate to say that these particular changes are symptoms of the same corporate change of direction that the change of CEO was, not that the change of CEO specifically resulted in these releases.
- nbevans 13y ago
  Quite a lot of people actually. These moves have been on the cards for years. Just waiting now for the next big move in the coming months of when they acquire Xamarin.
  - svas 13y ago
    I was hoping there would be an announcement at Build that they had acquired Xamarin, but that didn't happen. All that was mentioned was that they were a partner that they were working with. Still a possibility in the future though. The open sourcing of Roslyn can only mean good things for Xamarin.
    - cwyers 13y ago
      Microsoft clearly is involving Xamarin in this announcement -- parts of Xamarin are going into the same dot net Foundation that's in charge of this, and de Icaza was on stage for part of this. It may be best for Microsoft at this point if they support and involve Xamarin without buying it outright, people who want to use Xamarin with MS tooling can take advantage of Visual Studio integration, people who are wary of Microsoft can use Xamarin Studio and Mono and never officially touch Microsoft's stack while still becoming part of their ecosystem.
      - CCs 13y ago
        How this affects the (pretty high) Xamarin prices? https://store.xamarin.com/ https://store.xamarin.com/
- cwyers 13y ago
  yulaow, clearly the lead-time on a lot of this stuff is longer than Ballmer's been gone, so yeah, not fair to put all this on his departure. "Five months" was a pithy play off "five years," nothing more or less than that.
  - louthy 13y ago
    Does it really take that long to make a decision to open source something? Perhaps for a large company it does, I dunno. The projects themselves may have been in development for a long time (this is definitely true of Roslyn), but that doesn't mean they were always going to be open sourced.
    - cwyers 13y ago
      They announced a Foundation with members outside of Microsoft, in charge of a mix of their code and code from Xamarin. So you need to coordinate all of that. You also probably need to have lawyers review all the code and make sure that MS has the rights to everything included so they can do this, someone to scrub all the comments to make sure developers didn't throw in something embarrassing or worse, you need to set up workflows for reviewing community bug reports and patches... this isn't something you can do in an afternoon.
      - louthy 13y ago
        > this isn't something you can do in an afternoon. How about in 5 months? Don't get me wrong I'm not falling on either side of this argument, but I think it seems at least slightly plausible that this process could have been initiated or at least accelerated by the new CEO.
- bunderbunder 13y ago
  ASP.NET went open source 2 years and a few days ago. Since at least that long ago, things have pretty steadily been heading in this direction. Only reason we haven't seen things more along any more quickly is that companies this size just don't move that fast.

Pxtl 13y ago

... as awesome as this is, I'm gonna be That Guy: No WPF?

keithwarren 13y ago
WPF is more or less owned by the Windows team. This is all stuff under Scott Guthrie's control
- vtbassmatt 13y ago
  Pedantic: From the job posting that a sibling comment linked, the display tech appears to be under OSG. That means it's actually under Terry Myerson, not Scott Guthrie.
Aaronontheweb 13y ago
WPF just got some love a few minutes ago - they've got plans for a new release of it by the sound of things.
- beagle3 13y ago
  I have a few WPF 4 bugs that were marked "fix in next version" 3-4 years ago, and then it was announced that there is no next version - i'm in the process of moving off WPF and this newfound love is not going to change anything.
  - _random_ 13y ago
    Yes. Good luck to Microsoft trying to be relevant in HTML5 space.
  - bananas 13y ago
    Similar problem with IE for me. I raised a case with gold partner support when IE9 came out as it broke ClickOnce download prompting. Been bouncing back and forth between framework and IE teams ever since. Result: we now have to ship a .reg file to our clients before we can launch our shit via ClickOnce. That's only 2000 people we now have to hand hold through this.....

baldfat 13y ago

Once again the whole KILL MONO FUD was the actions of the Open Source Community in the last 5 years. I never understood how in the world they got this is a trap from everything that was happening. I don't agree with RMS many times but in this one way he was 100% wrong when he targeted mono.

acqq 13y ago
Microsoft would never make the moves it does now if not for being scared of becoming less relevant. Until they really make free enough licenses not only for the core stuff but for the crucial libraries nobody can expect to be off-the-hook of the traditional lock-in. And even if they do all that, it doesn't mean anybody was "wrong" only that the conditions are changing and allow reconsideration.
sparkie 13y ago
Microsoft originally only released a specification for V.2 of C# and the Common Language Runtime (ECMA-334 and ECMA-335) - attached to it a promise that they would not sue, iff the framework was "implemented in whole" - which was very vague in that it didn't specify what could be included or omitted in order to make it compatible with other platforms. The clause was obviously added to prevent fragmentation of the platform though - ensuring that it stayed compatible with MS's product, and thus they'd continue to hold control over it. C# 2.0 is nearly a decade old now - and mono certainly hasn't limited itself to it. Absolutely none of C# 3, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5 was ever released as an open specification or as open source software until now - yet these are the versions mono and everyone was using. So the "MONO FUD" was never actually FUD, it was legitimate concerns about the lack of openness of the technology. Those are no longer concerns (about this release version) - and we can be glad that RMS et al were "wrong" about this one (When they were in fact, absolutely right at the time.)
Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
I get pretty tired of writing a bunch of open-source C# code and getting flack for it. I'm glad there's finally no foothold left for the Mono FUD crowd.
bambam12897 13y ago

caycep 13y ago

signs of the new Satya Nadella era?

ygra 13y ago
All this started long ago. Roslyn has been in development for a few years and that was still under Ballmer's leadership. Also many of the other things they're unveiling and open-sourcing now started way before Nadella took over as CEO. But my guess would be that Ballmer stepping down was sort of symbolic in this regard. With a new CEO it looks more like a "new Microsoft" doing all these things.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  Just because they were working on it before doesn't mean that the plan at the time was to open-source those things...
  - untaken 13y ago
    They couldn't have done it that fast. They just couldn't do it while Ballmer was there - not after his anti-OSS rants. And he knew it.

leoc 13y ago

Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).

MagerValp 13y ago
I don't think it's particularly fair to lump Apple with the rest since 14 years later [1] the core OS is still open source [2], and they're actively working on several high profile open source projects (e.g. Webkit, CUPS, and clang). They're not exactly irrelevant either. [1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Dar... [2] http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  Given that all of those are already open sourced, do you know how bad it would look to close source them now? Especially Webkit/KHTML - that would be a PR disaster. I don't keep track of what Apple does - have they open sourced anything within the last few years? If not, I think they fit right in with the other companies.

pera 13y ago

> Who would have imagined this 10 years ago? well, Microsoft used to say that open source software was anti-american, cancer, communist, anti-competitive, etc... yup I think they changed a bit

drawkbox 13y ago

Big fan of the way Nadella is starting out, Microsoft may reverse the polarity of developers from disengaging back to attracting to Microsoft if they keep this up.

Iv 13y ago

Dumb question: is that the real deal? I see a lot of items, but I don't know how they relate to typical uses of .Net. So I guess my question is more for .Net specialists: With the code released, can you: - Run a ASP.Net web server? - Run a classic C# .Net project better than with Mono?