http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-open-sou ... 000028031/
In a move few would have ever imagined coming to pass, Microsoft is open sourcing more of its .Net developer framework and programming languages.
In a move few would have ever imagined coming to pass, Microsoft is open sourcing more of its .Net developer framework and programming languages.
Among the .Net technologies that Microsoft is open-sourcing is its "Roslyn" compiler, which is the foundation for future versions of Visual Basic and C#. Microsoft's announcement last week means all future iterations of these compilers will be open sourced under an Apache 2.0 license.
So will Microsoft take the next step and open source the core of .Net, including the Base Class Libraries (BCL) and Common Language Runtime (CLR)?
"We are taking it one step at a time," said Somasegar. "If it's truly beneficial for us and for the community," Microsoft will consider it, Somasegar said. But there has to be a proven need, he emphasized. For example, Microsoft provided Xamarin with the BCL documentation late last week given that company's proven need for it.
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.
Steven W wrote:...Among the .Net technologies that Microsoft is open-sourcing is its "Roslyn" compiler, which is the foundation for future versions of Visual Basic and C#...
...There's always a catch...
Roslyn has been described as "compiler-as-a-service technology," a term that's caused a lot of confusion. I've even seen headlines heralding the project as "Microsoft's cloud compiler service" or "bringing .Net to the cloud." None of that is correct. Technically, it would be possible to offer code compilation as a cloud-based service, but it's hard to see the advantage, except in special circumstances.
Roslyn isn't services in the sense of software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or similar cloud offerings. Rather, it's services in the sense of Windows services. Roslyn is a complete reengineering of Microsoft's .Net compiler toolchain in a new way, such that each phase of the code compilation process is exposed as a service that can be consumed by other applications.