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Developers: Microsoft Open Sources
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Developers: Microsoft Open Sources .NET Micro Framework on Monday November 16, @05:42PM
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An anonymous reader writes "Back in July, Microsoft announced it was making .NET available under its Community Promise, which in theory allowed free software developers to use the technology without fear of patent lawsuits. Not surprisingly, many free software geeks were unconvinced by the promise (after all, what's a promise compared to an actual open licence?), but now Microsoft has taken things to the next level by releasing the .NET Micro Framework under the Apache 2.0 licence. Yes, you read that correctly: a sizeable chunk of .NET is about to go open source."
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Submission: Microsoft open sources .NET Micro Framework by Anonymous Coward
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My first question would be... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just what is Microsoft's angle? Surely they are gaining some advantage here.
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't .NET a back-end thing? And if it's open, then it doesn't mean you're forced to use anything from MS on the back-end either.
So, what is to be gained? The ability to say they have x% of the server market or something?
Re:My first question would be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a .NET developer... but I seem to remember having to run .NET applications with the .NET framework on my local machine?
I'm not sure how much Microsoft gains by keeping .NET closed-source. Perhaps that's a good question, too: why not open source it. I don't think you have to pay anything to do .NET development, do you? So may as well get any free improvements from the open source community. ;)
Parent
Re:My first question would be... (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps that's a good question, too: why not open source it.
I can give one example.
Where I work, our ERP software is primarily coded in .NET, and needs 3.5.
It is the only reason to stick with Windows on each and every workstation there. .NET, only to see 2.x is only partially supported with no plans on supporting 3.
Every so often I check up on the status of Wine and
If this lets me run our ERP client under Linux, be it Wine or Mono or whatever wrapper is needed, that will be a good number of workstation licenses that will fall out of the upgrade cycle.
It will also let us deploy more ERP dedicated terminals on slightly older hardware that XP doesn't treat too well, and 2k is too painful to run on (Plus we only have so many licenses for 2k that aren't OEM)
This could very well lead to a measured loss of sales. I am sure I am not the only one in that type of situation, even if it is not very common.
Still, I am not complaining!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
also, there are free (as in beer) licences of VS express.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sybase? I think you mean MSSQL. Also, the Eclipse IDE actually has some capability for .NET development now [ibm.com]. This can easily be used with open version control solutions. It may not be good for developers who are doing large projects, but for anyone developing plug-ins for office apps or something similar it's not too bad.
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Insightful)
VS(.NET)
Visual Studio 2008 Express is free.
Windows
Yes, unless you use Mono.
SourceSafe, Windows Server, Sybase SQL
No, no, and no. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Parent
Re:My first question would be... (Score:4, Informative)
There is Sharp Develop [icsharpcode.net][www.icsharpcode.net]. An open source IDE for .NET. It supports C#, VB, Boo, and F#.
Parent
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need SourceSafe at all to do any sort of .NET development. Subversion, git, CVS, etc. all work fine for .NET development.
SourceSafe would be better off forgotten entirely.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
To do .NET development well, you'll need to get licenses for VS(.NET),
Wrong.
Windows,
Wrong.
SourceSafe,
Wrong.
Windows Server,
Wrong.
Sybase SQL,
Not just wrong, but mystifying! Sybase? Not... MS SQL Express? That would have made sense.
Anyway, congratulations! You're five-for-five. You've succeeded in crafting a perfectly factless post.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of people have corrected you, but I'm going to correct you in a different manner: not only is SourceSafe not required, but MS has basically been trying to phase it out in favor of Team Foundation Server (part of VS Enterprise I think) for a while now.
MS knows SourceSafe is crap; it's one of the few products that no one dogfoods internally.
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's slightly different crap now.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually SourceSafe is dead, has been for a few years, and its my understanding that MS never actually used it for their own code.
Re:My first question would be... (Score:4, Informative)
Bogus. Mono is very current with .NET and has even beaten MS to the punch on some features. The major missing features compared to .NET are the MS specific libraries and proper current Silverlight support. So unless you're developing Silverlight apps or Windows specific software (which would obviate the choice to use Mono anyway) I doubt you have even tried Mono.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
If those are the only things you think Mono is missing, you don't know much about the differences between Mono and the MS compilers and frame works.
First major problem in Mono: Non defragmenting garbage collector.
You can't consider Mono a replacement when it leaves out a major reason to use the .NET framework. It will work OK for small, short lived ( as in short runtime ) apps, but when you start talking about services that run for long periods of time or ASP.NET applications, Mono sucks. Yes, it will 'wo
Re:My first question would be... (Score:4, Informative)
.NET micro is mostly for embedded devices running WinCE.
Nope, you're wrong. You're thinking of the .Net Compact Framework [wikipedia.org]. Basically there are three .NET implementations available from MS (ignoring Rotor for the time being). The Windows one (known as "the .Net Framework") is the largest, with lots of libraries and capabilities. The Compact Framework targets Win CE level devices (fewer resources, lower capabilities), and takes about 12 Mbytes. The .NET Micro Framework [wikipedia.org] targets even smaller devices; it has a subset of the .NET classes, and can fit in 300 kBytes or less. The .NET Micro Framework doesn't need an OS to run (but it can run on an OS). That's the thing that was running in the (now defunct) SPOT watches and MSN Direct traffic dongles. Those were tiny devices which couldn't have run Win CE.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The best IDE for .NET development is still Visual Studio by a long shot, and licenses for it aren't cheap.
True -- they're free [microsoft.com]. Well, not all versions, but you can get a long way with the free versions.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Haven't people been yelling about for years how you can make money with open source? Maybe someone at MS believed them. Despite the general feeling that MS is "out to get you", a company is made up of people, and is not a big bad menace who does evil for evils sake. MS as a corporate entity has exactly one goal (the same as any other company) - make money for its investors. If they can make more money with open source then why is it a surprise they would pursue that avenue?
Parent
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Informative)
and it is also a company, a hierarchal organization were those lower down have to do what those higher up tell them to do. Those higher up have a pattern of behavior that justifies many of the fears on Slashdot. Groklaw is full of evidence, much of which was gained through court systems from around the world.
So to quote Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
So whats changed
Parent
Re:My first question would be... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, maybe MS believes that they can use this route to make better software too. If the OSS community can respond and show MS how much there is to benefit from opening one of their projects, maybe they'll be more responsive with other projects too.
The OSS community should see this as an opportunity to give something back to MS for good reason. They would be less likely to stab the OSS community in the back with patent suits and the like if we can engender a true, two-way relationship. Maybe with some dialogue, we can start moving toward working in harmony instead of against each other.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, you mean a multinational corporation with a fiduciary duty to return shareholder value thinks there might be some "angle" in this? Slashdot seriously needs a -1 (Durr) mod.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows Mobile.
This is their smallest subset of .NET. They are already pretty much giving the code away to developers for Windows Mobile, now they are having their arses handed to them by Android and it's only looking worse. They keep going at this rate and they are going to be irrelevant. That's not what they want. So therefore they open source .NET in the hope that they can get some more traction in the market.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What is their angle?
They're a company of 40,000+ engineers, a substantial portion of which are not total douchebags, unlike how people on Slashdot seem to imagine them.
Lots of them use open source, lots of them like the idea of open source but, like many on here, have to juggle the realities of a paycheck with their own feelings on the matter.
When you're a company the size of Microsoft, even if you have an internal upswelling of support for open sourcing things, you have to fight both the business people an
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I'm ill (Score:5, Funny)
I must have the swine flu. Maybe I'm having a psychotic episode. Did I wind up in a holodeck? Or the Twilight Zone? It must be one of these things because I keep having these senseless hallucinations where MicroSoft acts like a decent company.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I must have the swine flu
Yes, with pigs flying and all .. that shot isn't looking *that* bad now.
Re:I think I'm ill (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Marketshare in Mobile Market (Score:5, Insightful)
If the Framework gets ported to non-MS platforms, having those developers develop on Visual Studio, on Windows, in Windows eco-systems is additional trivial.
I am absolutely certain that iPhone development is causing iPhone developers to learn and be comfortable with XCode on Mac machines while at the same time creating more skilled Objective-C coders that will be more proficent in writing normal OS X applications.
XCode has more than you think (Score:3, Interesting)
XCode is actually a pretty good tool, and while the multiple floating windows of IB can be hard to deal with I find that approach to GUI design to be way, way better than code-behind stuff UI tools normally spit out.
If you take the time to learn how to use XCode you'll find it does a lot more than you are thinking it does.
OMG it is Meta EEE! (Score:5, Funny)
There is a problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I was initially impressed by the MS 'open' pledges, until I talked to several coder friends. Their take, paraphrased, was that it was window dressing with a lot of traps. Basically, they 'opened' the wrapper, just like they did with their Office formats.
The problem, as it was explained to me, is that if you want to do anything useful, you have to call a bunch of things that are not opened, will not be opened, and MS can still sue your *ss off for using. One person asked how useful it is to 'open' the hypothetical call, Play_video_with_MS_proprietary_closed_codec? I mean, you can copy the functionality, but your software is only cross-platform to the extent that MS proprietary and closed codecs and other things are 'open'.
This is nothing more than a stealth PR attempt, they will use it to say, "We opened everything up, and see, Linux still sux0rz because it can't play movies, sound, DRM, or anything else useful. We opened everything up, but the Linux model is broken, and their lazy codes won't do the right thing. If you want real XYZ, you need Windows".
It is nothing more than opening the most useless bits, and using it as a PR hammer. Yay progress?
-Charlie
Re:There is a problem (Score:4, Interesting)
``This is nothing more than a stealth PR attempt, they will use it to say, "We opened everything up, and see ..."''
Or maybe it's just fear of more lawsuits from the EU.
However, the result is that .NET Micro Framework is now open source. That's a Good Thing.
Parent
Yeah, sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, sure (Score:4, Interesting)
This. The Micro Framework is for resource-constrained embedded devices... which are just about the last place you'd want to run bytecode anyway, as far as I can see. We've got tons of embedded stuff where I work, but I fail to see how controllers for mechanical bits and pieces are going to benefit from having the CLR, object classes, GUIs, etc. made available to them.
I think they're targetting the same area as some embedded Java implementations, like MicroJava [is2t.com]. You're getting a nice programming environment (you can use Visual Studio to write C# software for your embedded app), you're getting automatic memory management and it'll offer a migration path for people familiar with larger platforms. While it's not going to be as efficient as hand-tightened C and/or assembly code, it should allow faster development for embedded applications.
Yes, I know they're hoping to scoop the mobile market, but which part of it - the non-smartphone (dumbphone) market?
Not sure they're interested only (or even mainly) in the mobile market; the .NET MF can run on much lower performance processors than the ones used in phones, even feature phones (i.e., not smartphones). From what I've seen most phones use ARM 9 level CPUs, or even ARM + DSP combos, like the TI's OMAP (please feel free to correct me, phones aren't an area I have much interest in). That's overkill for the .NET MF which can happily run on ARM7 level CPUs.
Parent
As Admiral Ackbar warned (Score:4, Informative)
It's A Trap!
Your tongues can't repel flavor of that magnitude! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugh, I guess we'll have to eat this boring oatmeal...
It's A Trap!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I know you're joking and I don't mean to direct this at you necissarily but I think it should be said.
Many companies suck. They abuse their positions and take advantage of their customers, they manipulate the writing and interpretation of laws to suit their ends, they sue innocent people in an effort to scare people into respecting their intangible rights. Slashdot, correctly, berates them when there is news about this kind of thing. We help spread knowledge of their actions and provide sometimes insight
Why not give them some cred for trying? (Score:3, Insightful)
Still behind the curve. (Score:3, Informative)
This is all about trying to gain mobile market share, but realistically all they're doing is highlighting the headache. Thanks, but I don't want to build an app in Objective C, Java, and .Net and get them certified by Google, and Microsoft, and Apple. What a headache. As usual Microsoft is arriving at the point when the whole idea of writing custom apps per phone is starting to jump the shark.
If they would release an easy to use IE mobile virtual images like they've done for all the current IE desktop applications they might actually have something like a leg up on their competition (I know they have some emulator inside Visual Studio, but that's not the same).
Google has a cross-platform emulator, but neither Apple nor Microsoft do. This could easily be another situation like Firefox where developers design webapps for Android and make them work passably on the other browsers.
Re:Mono? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope this framework is for mobile devices and the 360.
Microsoft is really dieing in the mobile space right now. WinMo 6.5 Still doesn't have native support capacitive touch screens and the Mobile world is on fire with Android and of course the iPhone.
HTC, LG, and Samsung are all developing or have released Android phones.
Palm and Motorola are now dropping WinMo and going with WebOS and Android.
This is one space where Microsoft is at best an also ran and really is dropping in the race for mind share.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dominating? (Score:3, Informative)
They may have overtaken Palm by a large margin, but they never even caught up with RIM let alone "dominated" the market as a whole which included other players like Nokia and Samsung as well.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Open Sourcing Platform Lock-In Is Meaningless (Score:4, Insightful)
Making it open source allows you to use it, distribute it, and modify it. Even if nobody ports it to your favorite platform, it's still a win for the users. No longer do you have to depend on Microsoft for bugfixes. No longer do you have to hope that, one day, they will implement the feature you're waiting for. Microsoft is no longer the only party allowed to improve the platform or tailor it to your needs. Once it's open source, everyone is allowed to do so.
So while you are right that making the software open source doesn't magically make it portable, it is far from meaningless.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hahaha, nice one.
In case you're not getting the joke: The very definition of open-source [opensource.org] states that modification and distribution must be allowed.
So yes. If it is open source, you _are_ allowed to distribute and modify, exactly as I stated.
Also, Free software and open source software are _not_ different things (and neither does the article referenced by the parent [gnu.org] claim they are). The difference is not in the software, but in the philosophy: open source is the apolitical term, whereas Free software is the