Dot Net Framework Reference License
Microsoft is releasing the .NET Framework reference source code under the Microsoft Reference License. This will give developers the opportunity to understand more about .NET. Scott Guthrie, general manager of the Microsoft .Net Framework in Microsoft’s Developer Division, himself explains, the Microsoft Reference License allows viewing of source code, but not modification or redistribution. The source code will be downloadable and viewable by anyone who accepts the license agreement. This is another step in Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative. There is already a set of open-source programs, Mono, that let you develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows and Unix. Mono is sponsored by Novell. It’s led by noted open-source developer Miguel de Icaza. The Mono code is covered by three different real open-source licenses. The C# Compiler and tools are released under the terms of the GPLv2 (GNU General Public License); the runtime libraries are under the LGPL 2.0 (GNU Library GPL 2); and the class libraries are released under the terms of the MIT 11 license. Mono is also working on porting Microsoft’s Silverlight 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer Web user experiences in a project called Moonlight. I think this is a really positive step forward. Tools like Reflector already do this, but it’ll be nice to have this integrated into Studio directly, not to mention the ability to view source comments. But this will create confusion in mono project. This is a very restricted license and it is not OSI approved, so in terms of a “new open source trend” this is not a good idea. However, even if it’s not “open source” it is still a step towards a more open Microsoft. This will no doubt be very useful for many people. Whoever is pushing these things in Microsoft, keep pushing. I hope to see a fully open source .NET framework in future, today we have moved a little closer to this.
Reference : Scott Guthrie’s Blog, eWeek
Technorati Tags: microsoft, .net, dotnet, framework, opensource, osi, mono, silverlight, moonlight, linux
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Paul Regan Said,
October 8, 2007 @ 2:56 pm
I have been trying to compile a .NET 2.0 app w/ monodevelop & prj2make [on debian linux] without success and this is of intrest regarding compiling .NET applications on Linux.