New Open Source-Loving Microsoft Celebrates .NET's 20th Anniversary (thenewstack.io)
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From Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column:
The 20th anniversary of .NET is upon us this week and with it, Microsoft is pulling out all the stops in celebration of what it says is "the most loved framework by developers for three years in a row now — 2019, 2020, 2021, according to Stack Overflow's developer survey."
First launched in 2002, .NET is, in some ways, something that Microsoft can roll out as evidence of its changed ways over the years. It went from a company embroiled in a monopoly case just a year before this release, to one that later decided to turn around, mend its former ways, and open source .NET Core. "When Microsoft made another major transformation, this time towards open source, .NET was also at the forefront," Microsoft writes in this week's celebratory blog post. "By 2012, we had fully open-sourced the ASP.NET MVC web framework and were accepting contributions. It was one of Microsoft's first major open-source projects at the time. In 2014, we started to build a cross-platform and open-source .NET on GitHub and were floored at the incredible support and contributions from the open-source community...."
Certainly, in comparison to the Microsoft we once knew, there has been a massive shift in its approach to open source software and openness in general. Indeed, these days, Microsoft is also synonymous with another giant in the world of open source, its now-subsidiary GitHub — as well as the npm Registry and countless other projects. Microsoft has transformed from a company that was once led by a man who said that "Linux is a cancer" to one that has more recently welcomed Linux to the Windows desktop, among numerous other open source endeavors.
The column ends by remembering what it calls "Microsoft 'hot reload' drama" last year — Microsoft's removal of the feature from the .NET SDK repo (and its subsequent return, with an apology). "All that's to say, perhaps all's well that ends well, and we should indeed celebrate 20 years of success with a now open source framework. In the same breath, vigilance may be necessary should we want to celebrate another such anniversary in the future."
First launched in 2002, .NET is, in some ways, something that Microsoft can roll out as evidence of its changed ways over the years. It went from a company embroiled in a monopoly case just a year before this release, to one that later decided to turn around, mend its former ways, and open source .NET Core. "When Microsoft made another major transformation, this time towards open source, .NET was also at the forefront," Microsoft writes in this week's celebratory blog post. "By 2012, we had fully open-sourced the ASP.NET MVC web framework and were accepting contributions. It was one of Microsoft's first major open-source projects at the time. In 2014, we started to build a cross-platform and open-source .NET on GitHub and were floored at the incredible support and contributions from the open-source community...."
Certainly, in comparison to the Microsoft we once knew, there has been a massive shift in its approach to open source software and openness in general. Indeed, these days, Microsoft is also synonymous with another giant in the world of open source, its now-subsidiary GitHub — as well as the npm Registry and countless other projects. Microsoft has transformed from a company that was once led by a man who said that "Linux is a cancer" to one that has more recently welcomed Linux to the Windows desktop, among numerous other open source endeavors.
The column ends by remembering what it calls "Microsoft 'hot reload' drama" last year — Microsoft's removal of the feature from the .NET SDK repo (and its subsequent return, with an apology). "All that's to say, perhaps all's well that ends well, and we should indeed celebrate 20 years of success with a now open source framework. In the same breath, vigilance may be necessary should we want to celebrate another such anniversary in the future."
You mean we can get developers for free? (Score:1)
Embrace.
recently welcomed Linux to the Windows desktop
Extend.
They have not changed at all.
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Oh they have changed.
There is a lot less FUD from them about Linux. They had a period where Linux was Public Enemy #1
But the part you quote is indeed still very active.
Re:You mean we can get developers for free? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh they have changed.
There is a lot less FUD from them about Linux. They had a period where Linux was Public Enemy #1
But the part you quote is indeed still very active.
I think that the aversion to open source was because 20 years ago open source had no clear and legal way for a corporation to develop that and their own software. Just demanding that say, a company like microsoft just open source something... then put it out there for everyone, you, me, them, to contribute to while being completely liable for that product was at the time unreasonable.
Re: You mean we can get developers for free? (Score:4, Interesting)
How would they be liable for it? They're not even liable for closed source software.
But at the time their business model was based on selling software, not services. Nowadays their business model is focused heavily on selling services, and software acts as the carrot to lure you to those services.
That is basically the way almost every software company has gone, actually. Nobody really pays for software anymore, unless you're either a gamer or a business.
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Yes they sold software but the regulation of software sold was coming together and the service provided was the actual provider's legal responsibility. A corporate entity's only responsibility is service provided so the choice was providing software or the service abstraction of the software not both.
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Sure. That is because MS does not care one bit about the Windows users these days. They found out that offering cloud services is much more profitable and who cares who provides the OS. But to the surprise of really nobody. the MS Linux distro is backdoored and insecure. MS will screw its users always as hard as it can and they are never going to change.
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Hahaha, I see the MS shills and the "useful idiots" that shill for MS without even getting paid for it are out in force today.
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As are the time-expired cunts like you.
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As are the time-expired cunts like you.
Well, _you_ are definitely an useful idiot. Pathetic and very, very funny!
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So... no outright hostility = "friendly"?
If they were FOSS friendly, they'd have open sourced Windows & Office years ago.
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They might have changed their methods, but not their goals.
Re: You mean we can get developers for free? (Score:2)
I'm not sure they've changed their methods.
They got their knuckles rapped over monopoly violations with Edge, just as they did with IE.
They used threats, corruption and bribery to get their Office file format an international standard, which they then didn't stick to.
They've worked hard at stopping people writing alternative front-ends for Windows.
Their Store randomly resets permissions to prevent third-party installs.
They are a major sponsor of SCO's continued legal attacks on IBM and Linux.
There are many
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but when a massive linux company does it, its a brotherhood
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What's the license? What restrictions are on the use?
Those are the questions I usually ask myself first. OTOH, I'll admit that if it's MS I just generally assume, without checking, that I won't like the strings attached. (Ditto for Google.) With Red Hat I check carefully, but I'm often dubious. GPL doesn't suffice if it's just to hook into proprietary code running on some other machine. AGPL comes closer, but doesn't really suffice. Some architectures are just ... too much effort for the return. (I
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What's the license? What restrictions are on the use?
Its free as in speech and beer!
Ubuntu got 138million in 2020 using free programmers
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I'm not a corporation. I don't have lawyers on retainer. I need to understand the terms of the license BEFORE I consider using the software. If I'm an end-user GPL is fine, and so are many others. As a developer...that's a lot less clear. Yes, I'm developing to suit my own purposes, but I don't want to end up being dragged into court. So GPL is fine if the code is self contained. When it starts communicating with other sites, or using remote connections, well, unless ALL that code is under GPL, I n
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Ah yes. 20 years of bullshit like this. 20 years of being told not to use C# because Microsoft would suddenly go after all their users for patent violations. 20 years (and more) of the old Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish line - but only with vague promises that the extinguish part is going to happen real soon now...
recently welcomed Linux to the Windows desktop
Extend.
In this case, how does implementing a subsystem for Linux to run equate to extending? The actual Linux distros that you can run under Windows is made by other people (example: Ubuntu [ubuntu.com]). Microsoft
So whats mircrosofts excuse for... (Score:2)
Why has not Microsoft yet provided the third primary user interface?
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Yeah, right? The .NET Core isn't the full .NET code supporting ASP.NET. Just open-sourcing .NET Core isn't how open-sourcing works, MSFT!!
What are you waiting for? Buying off the author of the open-source, clean-room implementation Mono, Miguel de Icaza, was a welcome gesture, but what has ever come of it? It's been almost a decade and I don't see anything other than .NET Core.
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I can't tell if you're being sarcastic...? Microsoft discontinued the old .NET Framework and fully transitioned to .NET Core, renaming it ".NET" as of version 5.0. ASP.NET Core has been available as long as .NET Core has been, since 2016. It's all opensource, from the framework to the libraries to the compiler to the runtime.
The old closed-source .NET Framework ended with the final release of 4.8 back in 2019 and will never see any updates beyond security and reliability bug fixes to keep legacy application
New Open Source-Loving Microsoft! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.NET is marketed as portable, but in practice it really isn't since they promote using windows-only libraries.
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There's always something to "ignore for the moment".
When there isn't, you will have a point. Until then, it's locked to Windows.
And it's way too late to say "from now on, it will be multi platform". There are twenty years of legacy software running on .NET, and nobody is going to rewrite their working business logic or CRM.
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If you're not designing GUI apps with Windows.Forms or WPF, it's fully cross-platform. You can take your ASP.NET Core web application and run it on a Linux Raspberry Pi without even recompiling. You can do the same with any non-GUI .NET app unless you explicitly went out of your way to manually import Win32 DLLs.
Re: New Open Source-Loving Microsoft! (Score:2)
.NET is marketed as portable, but in practice it really isn't since they promote using windows-only libraries.
In practice, this is the same situation for C, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, and anything else not shy about leaning on C bindings to provide functionality the native runtime doesn't.
So it's portable as in C, not portable as in Java, Java is exceptional, that's fair.
Re: New Open Source-Loving Microsoft! (Score:3)
Well, KDE, Qt, Gtk/Glib all run on Windows, Linux and Mac. So cross-platform GUI libraries exist.
I can compile Gnu C on Cygwin or Mingw, for the most part. There's a couple of features that haven't been ported.
And I can compile ISO standard C on just about any C compiler, although Visual C is probably the most messed-up. Provided there's a binding, I can use any of the aforementioned graphics libraries.
As far as binaries are concerned, older versions of Linux with the IBCS/ABI patch could run any x86/x84 bi
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A friend of mine is running software as a service, backend is .NET/C# REST service.
Works all fine.
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I've developed quite a lot of software for Linux in C#/.NET Core. Most of the libraries work just fine, it's only stuff that is OS specific like certain hardware interfacing or GUI related that doesn't work on non-Windows platforms.
MS does not love (F)OSS (Score:4, Insightful)
They just see a chance to exploit their users even more and are sure they can keep control in the end.
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They just see a chance to exploit their users even more and are sure they can keep control in the end.
Correct. The last 23+ years has seen the biggest attack on ownership. The dipossession of the PC gaming masses via rebranded rpg's with stolen networking code (mmo's) in 1997 that started with ultima online. Then we get another attack on game ownership with steam. Then the final dispossession in 2009 with league of legends, dota 2, warframe, and destiny.
Go have a read boys, if after reading that PDF you believe microsoft is your friend, you're a blimin idiot:
https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/... [cmu.edu]
More bullshi
100% BS (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a "new" Microsoft much less "open source-loving" one, it's the same game with a different angle. They launch a cripple open source version and then lure you into lock-in with better closed source features. They did it with .Net and they are doing it with the Linux compatibility layer. Sure, they opened the source of their terminal application... but only to their own benefit. They love that open source means that people will do their work for free but if you ask for anything beyond what they provide then you are talking to a wall. Want to know how to talk directly to LSASS, SMSS, or SCM? You're on your own. Want to use the Native API? You get a preselected list of functions they have begrudgingly allowed you to know about.
Microsoft hasn't changed, they've only changed your perception.
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Naive fools thinking their goals have changed. Way beck when Sun Microsystems licensed Java to Microsoft I was asking my self what the Sun lawyers were smoking to think they could get Microsoft to obey their legal requirements. This was over 20 years ago and today we still have people thinking Microsoft is a friend, is friendly to open source, etc etc. Fools.
LoB
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> They love that open source means that people will do their work for free
name one product microsoft _sells_ that is opensource.
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Actually, open source has changed MS a lot
Yes that's why intel, amd and microsoft are seeking to end honest binaries on your PC.
Go have a read:
https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/... [cmu.edu]
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I tried to read the abstract of that article and honestly, I don't understand it. I also don't know what are "honest binaries" and I really don't understand how DRM is related to open source.
The long and short of it is they are putting chips in our PC that can disable software remotely via windows update via having a digital policeman on your pc to enforce software licenses. We saw the beginning of the trial run of this with UWP games, when UWP exe games were cracked, they would be disabled in the next update. They are going to eventually do this to all software.
AKA when you buy games for switch, new games have bios updates that update the firmware to prevent piracy. They want to lock down t
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What do you mean "a cripple open source version"? The open source version of .NET is the *only* active version. The old closed-source version was abandoned and discontinued years ago and only receives occasional security updates.
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The open source .NET implementation is far from complete and thusly declared to be "core". It lacks many useful features from the closed source version which is exclusively Windows. Furthermore, they actively reject any implementations as being "out of scope," as well as extensions that are substitutes for the lost functionality, lest they fall victim to their own Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.
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Maybe that was true of .NET Core 1.0, but then there was 2.x, 3.x, and then it fully replaced the .NET Framework and was renamed from ".NET Core" to ".NET" as of 5.x and 6.x. If you can point any area at all in which it is missing important functionality of the old deprecated framework, feel free.
It's worth reinforcing: there is no active "closed source" version of .NET. The old framework was discontinued years ago and now only receives occasional security updates.
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Almost all the work on .NET is by Microsoft employees. The vast majority of Linux kernel work is by people being paid to do it, and Microsoft has contributed to it.
A lot of the big open source projects are that way.
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Almost all the work on .NET is by Microsoft employees.
It's hardly surprising as it's their API.
The vast majority of Linux kernel work is by people being paid to do it, and Microsoft has contributed to it.
I understand this because majority of the work on the kernel is being done to implement drivers for their own products.
A lot of the big open source projects are that way.
No, only the ones that corporations can benefit from modifying.
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I have no idea what you are talking about. Perhaps you responded to the wrong comment? If not, you are going to need to explain what you mean.
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You accused Microsoft of doing something "only to their own benefit".
In a sea of people and orgs shooting themselves in the foot, this seems commendable to me.
Micah
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You think selfish behavior that is harmful to others is commendable? You're all sorts of strange.
Embrace, extend, extinguish... (Score:2, Insightful)
We've all heard this plenty before. Anything touched by Microsoft should be considered incompatible with the open source movement. Else there pestilence will only spread until all of FOSS is extinguished.
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Nono! They really *have* changed!
It's now Embrace, Extend, Exploit.
WPF and WinForms (Score:2)
Did they celebrate with open source versions of the WPF and WinForms stack?
Yes they love open source and open standards so much that they want to create the next interconnected network platform without W3C involved...
"To me, just being great at game building gives us the permission to build this next platform, which is essentially the next internet: the embodied presence." - Nadella [windowscentral.com]
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LoB
Re:WPF and WinForms (Score:4, Informative)
WPF and WinForms have been Open Source for a while.
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Open source WPF: https://github.com/dotnet/wpf [github.com]
Open source WinForms: https://github.com/dotnet/winf... [github.com]
So, yes, they did, actually.
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Correct, and, though I've been intensely critical of Microsoft in the past, I do applaud them for their work on modern .NET Core. There is a lot you can do with Microsoft's fully free, open-source and cross-platform tooling, especially for server and Web work.
Unfortunately, because WPF and WinForms are wrappers around mostly Windows-specific libraries (DirectX and GDI), they are less than fully useful on other platforms, which is why I look forward to the maturing of MAUI and eventual Linux/GTK+ support
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Not being cross-platform is a different criticism than not being open source, however. There are lots of open source projects that are not cross-platform. They're working on it, though it's not clear that Microsoft is putting all that much resources towards MAUI, which makes me wonder if it will end up as another WPF where it adds too much complexity to replace WinForms as the default desktop UI toolkit.
MAUI is based on XAML like WPF was, and XAML was simultaneously WPF's biggest strength and greatest weakn
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Agreed. But much of .NET Core is indeed cross-platform, and with that, you can do an awful lot. There just isn't, yet, a great cross-platform desktop story.
There's a lot about XAML that I don't much care for, but I don't know anything out there that's much better, yet comparable in terms of being declarative, and allowing for clean separation of UI design and business logic (via MVVM or similar patterns).
new Microsoft my 455 (Score:5, Informative)
Remember how they stuffed to ISO to get their MS OOXML accepted as a "standard"? The list goes on like Santa's Nice List but it's a Naughty List for sure and it keeps getting added onto. Like this recent patent the were awarded...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/
One Microsoft Way because that's how they think.
LoB
Re:new Microsoft my 455 (Score:4, Informative)
Remember when Microsoft joined the OIN and released 60,000 patents (including exFAT) as royalty-free?
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And while they joined OIN it was only after they'd accumulated well over $3 BILLION in fake licensing fees from Android vendors.
As far as the 60,000 patents goes, a quick search of half a dozen sites mentioning it only say they could offer the patents to OIN members,
nothing about actually doing it and one site only mentioned that Microsoft held 60,000 patents and not that th
Long, Long live.... (Score:1)