Rotor: Shared Source CLI

Oink.NET writes "The O'Reilly Network reports on an unannounced BOF session at BSDCon 2002 regarding Rotor, a shared souce implementation of Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure that currently runs on Windows and FreeBSD. It relies on a Platform Adaptation Layer, similar to Apache's Portable Runtime, that simplifies porting to other OS's. As to the licensing terms, the Rotor FAQ says "Microsoft intends to provide very liberal non-commercial licensing terms and is interested in gathering community input on the design of the license." Wonder if that includes Slashdot community input..."

CLI

[ackthpt]

CLI == Command Line Interface | Command Line Interpreter

wtf is wrong with these people, reusing existing acronyms?

Re:Why FreeBSD, here's my opinion

[unsinged int]

Just to elaborate on that a bit... If someone wants to use a Unix-style OS, then typically they install BSD or Linux. Microsoft sees Linux as a threat, so by encouraging BSD the intended effect may be to even out the number of people using BSD and Linux. The point is 95% of all non-Windows users running Linux would be worse for Microsoft than if 50% run Linux and 50% run BSD. Power (or lack thereof) in numbers. Simple.

Re:Be very very careful.

[bartok]

From the Rotor FAQ:

"The license for this source code will be available at the time of first public release. Microsoft intends to provide very liberal non-commercial licensing terms and is interested in gathering community input on the design of the license. In particular, we intend to make it very easy for people to create non-commercial derivatives for exploration and experimentation, and for teaching purposes. We also intend to permit commercial use of this implementation as a guide for people building their own CLI implementations, for personal use, and for debugging purposes.Anyone expecting to use this implementation as the basis for distributing a commercial product would need to negotiate a license for this purpose with Microsoft."

Sounds like they want to allow people to look at the source to be able to see how things are done and use that knowledge to implement their own CLI.

Re:Be very very careful.

[david_stutz]

Our license will speak for itself when we make the code available, but our intentions are that the Rotor code be there to help CLI implementors.

The reason that we've chosen the non-commercial route is that we are in the software business to produce revenue, and we will certainly encourage people to use our commercial CLR on Windows, either from Visual Studio, or from the freely downloadable .NET Framework SDK [microsoft.com]. There will be a number of CLI implementations to choose from, and will be very happy to compete on the merits of our own implementations.

Once we release the Rotor code, I think that it is very likely that Microsoft will be approached by developers who might want to use Rotor in a commercial setting. I have no doubt that licensing this code for commercial use would be a possibility, but I'll leave discussing this topic until we actually make the code available and people get a chance to see what we are talking about in more detail...

Re:Windows Forms?

[david_stutz]

I've found it useful to think of the libraries that are included as part of the ECMA spec as a "modern" equivalent of the C runtime. They form a base set of capabilities for programmers that is obviously useful and not too controversial, and they do this without straying into areas where consensus might be harder to find.

There will be many different forms libraries implemented - Windows Forms will be one of many choices. On KDE, wouldn't you rather see the features of KDE in your forms? On GNOME? On small devices that have different UI models altogether?

As part of Rotor, we made sure to provide support for both calling native code from "managed code," and vice versa. To demonstrate that, I hope that we will be able to show a simple sample class that wraps Tcl/Tk as part of our distribution.

Re:Some simple economics for you.

[blowdart]

Seen FORTRAN under XP yet?

Yes [lahey.com]

There's also COBOL [adtools.com], Perl [activestate.com] and Python [activestate.com]