Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Oct 2007 19:39 UTC, submitted by gonzo
"One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year. We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, XML, and WPF. We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License."
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Member since:
2005-08-11
"I can see that I should have made a further edit for clarification. I didn't say that the lawsuits and FUD campaigns start tomorrow. MS wants to see .net widely adopted. They are willing to see it run on other platforms for now. But in the long term, they want .net to run on Windows and Windows only. (That's just Business 101, isn't it?) "
I gotta disagree with you, as I think the motivation behind this is to keep developers on Windows. They don't care where the final product actually runs, but if they can sell lots of copies of Visual Studio, then they still win,as every copy of VS needs a copy of Windows.
Being able to say that the code you write will be cross platform, well that's gravy. One of MSs strengths have always been a strong developer community (MSDN is a great resource), and the recent free versions of VS will only increase the amount of developers on Windows, who hopefully will upgrade to a paid copy when they outlive VS Express's functionality.
This I believe is one time that MS should, and will encourage the OSS version of their technology, as it is just another conduit to sell VS and Windows.