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)
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Let me get this straight: nothing happened for a year and a half, and that's news?
Re:This should have been seen from the start (Score:5, Funny)
Well... I didn't know it wasn't happening... :p
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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!
It's because FOSS is no longer the biggest fear (Score:5, Interesting)
Three years ago, the FOSS movement looked like one of the biggest potential threats against Microsoft. This move was designed to mitigate that threat, so it was worth investing energy in it. The idea was to dilute the concept of FOSS in the mind of the public, thereby weakening the FOSS "brand" as a competitor.
Today, it is appears that Apple and Google are far bigger threats to Microsoft than FOSS ever will be. So Microsoft will not be investing significant energy in trying to dilute the concept of FOSS anymore.
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Today, it is appears that Apple and Google are far bigger threats to Microsoft than FOSS ever will be.
Both Google and Apple are significant supporters of FOSS. Maybe the enemy hasn't changed all that much? Maybe Google and Apple wouldn't be so threatening had their attacks on FOSS been more successful?
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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.
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I assume that by "exploited", you mean "made significant contributions back to". And it's not an OS bolted "on top" of Unix - if you understood OS X's architecture (and you don't), you'd know that.
Aren't you the same guy who thought OS X wasn't a real Unix because it doesn't have the same filesystem layout as some Linux variant? A brutal mocking ensued, as I recall.
To the OP, you can get lots of Apple open source stuff here: http://opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]
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The portions mentioned in TFS weren't ever really to combat
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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.
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Re:This should have been seen from the start (Score:5, Informative)
First, Microsoft did not promise anything open source. They promised a read-only shared source version under the reference license. They delivered that, and are still delivering it, though as of yet no .net 4.0 libraries.. but that's only a couple of weeks old.
The reason the site hasn't been maintained was the the functionality was moved into visual studio for automatic download. It's just a part of the tools now.
Basically, the entire story is wrong.
Re:This should have been seen from the start (Score:4, Informative)
They posted it in many places, for example:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configuring-visual-studio-to-debug-net-framework-source-code.aspx [msdn.com]
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.
Of course (Score:2)
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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?
Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Of course (Score:4, Interesting)
The scary part here is that I'm sure plenty of people here are surprised. I wasn't ready to trust Microsoft, and I'm sure many others here weren't either, but an astonishing number of people -including some people in very high places, and yes, Mr. de Icaza, I am looking at you- were. Enough that there were flamewars any time anything remotely .NET-related or Mono-related came up.
Hopefully, we'll be able to get on with our lives now. This has happened before, and will probably happen again, and the community always survives. Some very interesting tools will either die or need to be ported, but that's always how it goes.
... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word (Score:5, Funny)
" ... and everyone believed Microsoft at its word ..."
Well, no one should have believed Microsoft at its word. Or Excel. Or powerpoint.
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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!
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:How is this different? (Score:5, Funny)
At the SourceForge site, someone responds to your questions with, "You have the code, figure it out yourself, asshole."
Worlds of difference, you see.
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?).
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Re:How is this different? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How is this different? (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft has a forum
Ziiiiing!
Re:How is this different? (Score:5, Funny)
No no no, that should be Biiiing!
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> that should be Biiiing!
I was thinking it should be "Bazinga!"
(Oops! Wrong format. Fixed that.)
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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: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?
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I've yet to see MSFT given credit for doing anything well here on Slashdot, but then people profess shock and dismay when they appear to not have fully embraced the open source ethos and done so better than "a kid in his basement" could have.
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Hey at least it's out there if someone wants to pick it up and go.
That's the beauty of actual open source.
I saw a prime example of this lately. I recently migrated to Ubuntu from Windows. I used a download manager in Windows called FreedDownloadManager (http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/). It's OSS(GPL), but it's written with Win32 in mind, so porting it would just be a mess. I found a decent download manager for Linux called Downloader for X(D4X), but it's been abandoned. The source code IS available,
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Are you not allowed to update D4X for personal use? Of course, making something that other people can use is always nice and saves someone else going through the same hassle.
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I don't think you're technically allowed to, though in reality regardless of license you can for all practical purposes modify something like that for personally use. Still though, I figure if I'm going to put in the effort anyways, I might as well publish it. Hence I started rewriting it in Mono (yeah, I know, but most of my GUI development experience is with Visual Studio as it's what I typically program with at work, so the transition to MonoDevelop is easier).
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You "know", but you're doing it anyway. What's the point? In a year, your code will be rotting like the rest, because it will be unusable to most people, despite being 95% "there".
What are you going on about? Mono-based code can be released under an OSS license, meaning it'll be plenty usable by other people if they so choose. I merely put in "I know" because some people have an (unreasonable IMHO) aversion to Mono. Any code that I end up putting out will be GPL licensed.
Summary Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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...
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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 st
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.
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As to why you'd want a modified version. Well, embedded systems, Linux, Mac OSX and
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open source != Open Source. Look it up. One is a English term, another is a copyrighted term.
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inciting the standard "M$ sux" response.
*pfft* Like that would work...
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I know it's fun to bash Microsoft
Actually, "fun" is an overly simplistic definition of it. Actually, it's an art that has some of the features of a sport.
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I get the idea he's hiding something, not sure why.
Re:Summary Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
They fixed it as soon as this story was posted. Tricky Microsoft!
Look at the forums. It was dead for more than a week.
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It's not open source; it is "shared source."
What is shared source?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source [wikipedia.org]
IIRC a number of products were made "shared source" in this manner, such as Windows Mobile 5 and earlier.
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Maybe this is a stupid question; but isn't getting the source a trivial task?
I thought there were free tools available that would turn .Net .DLLs into code?
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Yes there are plenty of tools that use the reflector; which is thwarted by the obfuscator. Even if you can reflect the code you get from stripped libs wont have the original symbols so its pretty hard to work with.
Kinda like when you generate assembly from machine code. Oh sure you get the code but you are going have to go over it line by line to understand anything.
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Gotcha - thank you.
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1. It's true that the reference source site has been down for several days but now appears to be up again .Net 4.0 source code, or any other question for that matter about reference source
2. It's also true that NOBODY from MS has been responding to questions about the lack of
I'm not bashing MS in general; in fact, I make my living by developing solutions centered around MS technology. However, I'm extremely annoyed at the lack of proper maintenance of the reference source archive. Not only about the bits that have never made it there to begin with, but that almost a month after the release of .Net 4.0/VS 2010, there's still no code for .Net 4.0. !
The lack of of .Net 4.0 code bugs me too. But fortunately VS 2010 supports .Net 3.5 too, so its easy to figure out the issue by debugging using 3.5
When the reference site was down even that was possible.
Unless you are using the new concurrent stuff or other .Net 4.0 specific stuff, debugging in 3.5 works fine.
I used to clean the my symbols cache folder periodically., but I have figured out how valuable it can be when Microsoft site goes down.
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But you do actually get your source releases, right? Like, it might not be on the timeframe you want, but you get them?
I know it's horrible when someone makes a valid criticism of Apple, but if I took something of yours and gave it back to you when /I/ was ready, rather than on the terms we agreed when you took it, would you be happy?
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> Fucking Slashcocks and their mindless self-entitled whining.
If Apple is using some bit of GPL software then they have a legal obligation to provide source. Expecting a multi-billion dollar corporation to live up to their legal obligations is hardly "self-entitled whining".
Your kind of bullsh*t is why the GPL was invented to begin with. Jerks like you can't be trusted to play nice with everyone else. So a framework needs to be in place to force you to.
The rule of law is not just for individuals. It's fo
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I can't believe it! When they release a major revision to their operating system, it sometimes takes them weeks to finalize a new release of the source code? That's... that's...
...licence non-compliance. Apple are welcome to write their own toolchain if they don't like the GPL. Also, I know the first couple of service packs of a new Apple major OS release are awful, but I'm fairly sure they've finalised the source they're using before they build the ISO.
"Don't talk when your mouth is full of toe jam."
I'm bothered by hypocritical Apple's living perfectly up to the 1984 image it mocked while millions of second rate users and developers waste my time and retard the computer landscape through being distracted by shiny junk. You're
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Sigh. As far as GPLv3 goes, this is Apple's obligation:
# b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium cus
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Your only objection is that they don't post things up there as quickly as you might like; Unfortunately, the GPL says nothing about how quickly the source must be made available, only that it must be made available.
Any reasonable person understands that nontrivial tasks take time to accomplish. Their posting of source code within several weeks of the binary release is a nontrivial task, and therefore... takes time. You can pout all you like about how
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> it sometimes takes them weeks to finalize a new release of the source code?
Not my problem.
If I have a copy of the a GPL binary, the distributor has a legal obligation to provide me the source.
If the binaries are ready to ship, then putting the source in a tarball is not some oppressive and unreasonable burden.
Mindless Apple fanboys with no technical knowledge are something else.
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Yes, they do. However, the GPL does not say anywhere that they must provide you the source on the day they release the binary, and in fact specifies no "acceptable timeframe" for doing so.
You may not be aware of this, but in the lead-up to a commercial software release, there is often a huge scramble to get everything finalized. In that scramble, "creating a tarball of the source code" is simply not
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and by definition, if you haven't yet released your software, there can be no users of that binary.
Within minutes after you've released, you will have distributed to users. And the moment you have distributed, you have an obligation under the licence. It's obtuse to the highest order to pretend that you haven't anticipated that your product will have users, or to pretend that your obligations under the licence of the code you distribute aren't of paramount importance.
Apple is in no way violating its obligations by taking "a few weeks" to gather the source code together and release it to the public
Only a court can decide that for sure. But there's a tangible competitive advantage in forcing someone to wait a few weeks for source code,
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Yes, you have an obligation under the license to provide any user who requests it with a copy of the source code.
The GPL only dictates that they must provide it to users who request it - not that they must provide it within moments or hours of the demand being made. Good luck arguing before any reasonable court that Apple saying, "Sure, we'll get that to you in 3 weeks," is somehow a violation of the terms of the GPL.
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False on several counts. Read the licence. If you're not distributing source physically, you must provide an offer "to give anyone who possesses the object code [...] access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge."
Where Corresponding Source (CS) is "all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities."
Thus:
1. The CS must exist as a prerequisite to distributing obje
Forking (Score:2)
Maybe someone can answer this better than me, I've not had the time to read over the Microsoft license.
Would it be possible to (legally) fork the project from the latest available codebase? Not saying if anyone would want to do it or not, but if the code is out there that might give some possibilities?
Re:Forking (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I believe source code access functionality is now integrated into Visual Studio, so it is not surprising that the web site is not updated anymore.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It works only if the reference code site is alive.
The site was dead for a week. I check it a few hours ago when debugging is Visual Studio.
Microsoft seems to have restarted the site when this story hit Slashdot!
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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.
Re:Forking (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's not an open source license. You get to see the source code, but you have no rights beyond that.
I once knew a girl like that.
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Bait and switch. (Score:3, Insightful)
I Was With You Until... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was getting your point until you hit Java. After watching the litany of trainwrecks that is the expensive java experiment in our company, Microsoft IS a safe alternative. In fact, I'd rather replace all our "successful because they delivered" java projects with a group of elderly asians with abacuses... aba... abacii? That'd be a warm and fluffy alternative to Java.
In other areas of the company they've been
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You don't remember the Microsoft version of Java? The one that was 'slightly' incompatible with all other versions of Java?
What ever do they mean? (Score:2)
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 sounds perfectly like most open source projects. I wonder what the exact percentage of dead to alive(and not in the parrot sense) projects there are on SourceForge, Freshmeat, et al. I wouldn't be suprised at least an 80/20 split.
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.
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Acting very much like many open source projects (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Acting very much like many open source projects (Score:5, Insightful)
.net reflector (Score:3, Informative)
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which of course, is also the best way to see the source code for many other companies .net software, even if they didn't expect it to be quite so open :)
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Well, duh. (Score:2)
They meant they wanted somebody else to maintain it.
Misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source quality/theft (Score:2, Funny)
First of all, there is the question of intellectual property. I don't see why Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) should do *anything* to help open source. How many millions of dollars has the open source community stolen from Microsoft over the years through the violation of their patents? Microsoft has found literally hundreds of examples of Linux violating their patents [cnn.com], and not a SINGLE Linux developer has come forward to apologize and offer recompense. Instead, Microsoft has been forced to seek o
Big chunks released under Apache license (Score:5, Interesting)
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>It also features a subset of the
The whole
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Large parts of .NET... have been released under the Apache license.
Wahoo! Now we can get .NET apps working to a large extent without having proprietary dependencies!
So.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Was going to say just that - I can probably find several dozen oss sites that are just as up to date / live.
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Lousy post ... (Score:3, Informative)
Profit Motive. (Score:2)
They are acting open source. (Score:5, Insightful)
Embrace, extend, extinguish? (Score:2)
Seems like a logical result to me, given the protagonist and antagonist in this story...
People here think .NET is Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
And what happened to those who got fooled by them (Score:2)
Microsoft has reneged on its promise (Score:2)
Really..
An extremely confused summary (Score:4, Informative)
This is wrong on so many counts, I don't even know where to begin here...
First of all, this:
Three years ago, with much fanfare, Microsoft announced it would make some of the .Net libraries open source using the Microsoft Reference License
There has never been an announcement that .NET framework libraries will become Open Source. Indeed, the very name of the license - "reference license" - indicates that it's not Open Source! The source is available for reference, so that developers can see what's going on, debug it, etc. It cannot be modified or redistributed.
And nowhere in the original announcement, or in any other documentation for the feature, has it been claimed that this somehow constitutes Open Source. Microsoft releases some of its projects under OSI-approved OSS licenses, and labels those OSS, so it is aware of the difference. There is no desire to confuse anyone about the nature of OSS, which is precisely why the term "open source" is not used here, and other terms, such as "shared source" or "reference source", are used instead.
Since then Microsoft has reneged on its promise.
Source code for .NET 3.5 was made available under MRL, and it still remains available. Source code for .NET 4 RTM isn't there yet (but one for .NET 4 RC is).
So, what promise was reneged on?
The reference code site is dead
It's not dead, it just takes time to update it with a new code release. It has .NET 4 RC bits, and that RC came out on February 10 this year - that's a far cry from "dead". Yes, it doesn't have .NET 4 RTM yet - but that has been released on April 12, less than a month ago. Give it time.
No, it's not an open source project where you see the live trunk directly. It was never meant to or claimed to be that, either. If you expected that, then you either misunderstood the original announcement (in which case I hope this clears it up), or you're just trolling...
Oh, it's a kdawson story. Nevermind.
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...what, just NOW?