Microsoft Introduces Open Source .NET Core

jeremy · 12-08-2014, 01:04 PM

Some additional information on a previous story we covered:

Quote:

At connect(), we announced that .NET Core will be entirely released as open source software. I also promised to follow up with more details on .NET Core. In this post, I’ll provide an overview of .NET Core, how we’re going to release it, how it relates to the .NET Framework, and what this means for cross-platform and open source development.

.NET Core is a modular implementation that can be used in a wide variety of verticals, scaling from the data center to touch based devices, is available as open source, and is supported by Microsoft on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Let me go into a bit more detail of how .NET Core looks like and how it addresses the issues I discussed earlier.

.NET Core is essentially a fork of the NET Framework whose implementation is also optimized around factoring concerns. Even though the scenarios of .NET Native (touch based devices) and ASP.NET 5 (server side web development) are quite different, we were able to provide a unified Base Class Library (BCL).

In order to take .NET cross platform in a sustainable way we decided to open source .NET Core.

From past experience we understand that the success of open source is a function of the community around it. A key aspect to this is an open and transparent development process that allows the community to participate in code reviews, read design documents, and contribute changes to the product.

Open source enables us to extend the .NET unification to cross platform development. It actively hurts the ecosystem if basic components like collections need to be implemented multiple times. The goal of .NET Core is having a single code base that can be used to build and support all the platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Much more at this MSDN Blog Post...

What are your thoughts on this?

--jeremy

neonsignal · 12-09-2014, 06:34 AM

There are some advantages to abstract computing environments (such as portability). But the companies which have initiated successful ones, notably the Sun/Oracle with the Java virtual machine and Microsoft with the .NET Common Language Runtime have been unwilling to open them up for standardization by the wider community.

This makes them undesirable platforms for the serious programmer, no matter how good their infrastructure, because they are subject to the whims of the sponsoring corporation. Technologies in this space become obsolete as the company pushes its next fashion, and competing implementations are subtly disadvantaged.

Microsoft's .NET is no different in this regard, and one must be wary of vendor lock-in.

It is not an issue about the merits of .NET as a technology. It is an issue about what it means to be an liberating technology: it is more than just "open" licences and "community" contributions, it is about who participates in the decision making and the processes by which decisions are made. Observing Microsoft over decades, I have no confidence that they sympathize, or even understand what this would look like.