[sf-lug] /soft.source

[Rick Moen]

Quoting maestro (maestro415 at gmail.com):

> well here's a topic for monday's meet-up...
> microsoft going open source to meet developers where they are rather than
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> attempting to force them to use proprietary closed source windows.
> hmmm...
> 
> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/29/microsoft-launches-its-net-distribution-for-linux-and-mac/

Did you understand what specific codebase they open-sourced, maestro?
Did you look up what licence they used, and try to figure out what the
significance is, if any?  Without the answer to those questions, all you
have is a news soundbites without any understanding of it.

They re-released the current version of something called '.NET
Core', which is a partial implementation of the .NET Framework, and
consists of the CoreCLR runtime engine and and CoreFX base class
library, both released under MIT Licence (a classic permissive licence).

The .NET framework is like Java in the sense of having a huge and
inpenetrable forest of libraries, and Microsoft has announced intent to
open-source some of those other libs in the future.  So, in one sense,
there is now a second .NET 'stack' in open source (alongside Mono).
In a different sense -- related libraries -- there isn't, just the core
runtime engine and base class library.  (Still, it's significant.)

Contributors who want their changes to be accepted into Microsoft's
upstream codebase are required to submit a Contributor Licence Agreement 
granting Microsoft patent immunity and a global copyright licence.  (The
latter doesn't mean much for a codebase already under MIT Licence.)  

(Notably absent from anything Microsoft is offering is much in the way of
patent protection for others.  But hey, that's life in the big city.)

My take on all this is that, under Satya Nadella (who's now been CEO 
for 16 months), the firm is trying to halt erosion of Microsoft's
mindshare to cloud computing and other Internet hosting on non-Microsoft
platforms, and attempt to drive some traffic to Microsoft Azure, which
reportedly hasn't been doing well.  That having been said, there may be 
even more changes in store under Ms. Nadella, who has definitely
rejected the Ballmer script and is striking out on his own very boldly.