Microsoft .Net Libraries Not Acting "Open Source"
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figleaf writes "Three years ago, with much fanfare, Microsoft announced it would make some of the .Net libraries open source using the Microsoft Reference License. Since then Microsoft has reneged on its promise. The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum."
This should have been seen from the start (Score:5, Insightful)
Same old, same old (Score:2, Insightful)
Same old, same old. Some things will never change.
I am still glad to hear about this specific topic although, just for my personal information.
... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Of course (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet they expected the OS community to have mirrored the reference code sites, start their own blogs, and master the libraries and dole out advice, if they really wanted the .NET Libraries to be Open Source.
Not defending Microsoft, it's not exactly cool, but like you said, what were they expecting?
How is this different? (Score:5, Insightful)
The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum.
How is this different from the majority of "real" FOSS projects on SourceForge?
Re:Sons of Bitches (Score:2, Insightful)
...what, just NOW?
Bait and switch. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Summary Misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
The other points in TFS might be valid, but I have doubts as to the poster's credibility.
Even if the statements about the blog and the forum are true, there's no requirement for open source projects to have active blogs and forums.
Acting very much like many open source projects (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How is this different? (Score:2, Insightful)
This one was supposedly run and supported by the biggest software company in the world, not by a high school student in his basement.
Re:Summary Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Microsoft's goal is/was to pollute the term 'open source' to mean things friendly to Microsoft's practices like this read-only license.
The license cites the code available as "read only."
"Reference use" means use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products....
http://referencesource.microsoft.com/referencesourcelicense.aspx [microsoft.com]
Oh, and yes, Microsoft still sucks. In this case it's because their brand of misinformation is particularly toxic to innovation.
Re:How is this different? (Score:5, Insightful)
They made it open source so that they didn't have to support it.
Then when they stopped supporting it, the open source community went Huh?
Re:Acting very much like many open source projects (Score:5, Insightful)
Which means looking at it contaminates developers. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not an open source license. You get to see the source code, but you have no rights beyond that. Preparing derivative works is not allowed.
Which means that looking at it "contaminates" the developers with knowledge of proprietary code.
If this article were about the the code itself, rather than the lack of support on Microsoft's end, I'd hang an "itsatrap" tag on it.
IMHO we're better off if the site DOES go away.
They are acting open source. (Score:5, Insightful)
People here think .NET is Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Summary Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing the point but I'm *glad* there is only one version of the .Net Framework 4.0
If the source was truly open, I'm sure someone, somewhere, would make something awesome, that I'd want to use, but it would require me using the forked (or whatever they call it) home-brew version that may or may not introduce instability into my application.
And when I took my problem online and said, 'WTF! I'm just doing System.Console.Writeline()' why doesn't this work!' it would lead to all sorts of confusion.
But yeah, I'm probably missing the point as my understanding of OpenSource is limited. I just don't see why you'd ever want to a modified version of the .Net Framework.
Re:What ever do they mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder what the exact percentage of largest software company in the world hosting an open source project to young, naive programmer thinking he can help by throwing up a sourgeforge page is? Comparing MS doing an open source project to most open source projects hardly seems fair.
To put it another way, if you compare MS to say Apache, Red Hat, Novell or Gnome then MS looks pretty bad at open source. Which, on the surface at least, is surprising because they do a much better job of hosting their MSDN content which is similar in scope to hosting a large open source project.
But it's actually not so surprising considering MS's schizophrenic attitude towards open source in general.
Re:How is this different? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or they'll upload a javadoc/pydoc dump of their uncommented and undocumented code as well, which is about as useful as simply being told to figure it out yourself.
Another possibility is of course that the maintainer comes up with some fairly lame excuse for not working on the project ("my dog had puppies a year ago and I've been completely dedicated to playing with them...") complete with promises of getting the project up to date ("...but I've been looking at some of the patches that have been submitted and there's gonna be a big update any day now.") which means most people will hold off on forking the project.
Then there's the "it's in CVS" projects, you know them, those projects that are required by a whole host of apps yet they haven't had a proper release since 2006, and before that the last release was in 2003, but hey, you can just grab the extremely active development branch from CVS/SVN/Git!
The last one has a close relative, the "1.x is featureless and out of date (but still gets security patches) and 2.x has been in alpha for three years now" projects. Just like the "it's in CVS" projects the bulk of interesting code for these tends to be in source control or in the 2.x.y.z.alpha23.tar.bz2 releases, and if you dare use the dev/alpha branch and find a problem with it and file a bug report you'd better be prepared to be chastised for not also submitting a patch...
And last but not least there are the "closed" projects which rarely accept patches from "outsiders", they have a dedicated group of developers who will tell you to write your own patch and submit it when there's a bug that's been around for over a year with all reports closed as "WILLNOTFIX" or "NOTABUG", and when you do it will be rejected only to have one of the "regular" developers submit an almost identical patch a few days or weeks later (yes, this has happened to me a couple of times, can you feel the bitterness?).
Re:It IS appropriate for MS to keep their work goi (Score:2, Insightful)
asp.net MVC 2.0 sourcecode, dated 11 march 2010 http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/41742 [codeplex.com]
freshly updated MS blogs regarding asp.net http://weblogs.asp.net/ [asp.net]
forums regarding most MS technologies seems pretty much alive also http://forums.asp.net/ [asp.net]
etc...
seems to me everything is very much alive, unlike some other open source projects...
Re:How is this different? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if the code is open source, that's still plagiarism.
Re:How is this different? (Score:1, Insightful)
1) Microsoft is bad at anything they do. Terrible. Absolutely no business attempting anything in technology because they only exist for their goal of returning us to the dark ages.
2) Free Software-supporting high school students are the smartest people on earth, and write software that is orders of magnitude better than any of these "pros" who work wage-slave jobs for proprietary-software companies.
Given that, I'd say it's entirely reasonable to expect that SourceForge and other FOSS repositories would be orders of magnitude more active, well-supported, and well-constructed than anything those bumbling idiots in Redmond would be capable of.
Re:This should have been seen from the start (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure why an abandoned site with a dead blog and no progress is somehow seen as un "Open source" like - the poster has clearly not looked at many open source projects!
Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple has exploited FOSS but that is something else.
They bolted their proprietary OS on top of Unix so they wouldn't have to re-invent that part.
Re:... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word (Score:3, Insightful)
For the same reason that people who voted for a party that then did not hold a single promise, but did the worst things possible, will get voted again by the very same people, as soon as “the other party” is in power, and the lie-machine of pre-election promises has started again.
99.999% of all people are fucking stupid cattle!
Re:It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear (Score:3, Insightful)
To expand on what he said, Visual Studio supports downloading and using the .NET source code and stepping through it with the debugger. This lets accomplished users determine where a problem in the code lies if it involves (often-times) complex API calls.
This would be akin to, I suppose, using GDB with your kernel + library sources plugged in as well.