Open.NET — .NET Libraries Go "Open Source"

An anonymous reader writes "whurley just posted a blog about Microsoft's announcement To Make .NET Libraries available under a crippled 'Open Source' program using their new Microsoft Reference License. The post includes the official pr doc from Microsoft as well as several points about how this really isn't open source. One example: If a developer finds a bug in the code, rather than fixing it themselves and submitting a patch to the community they'll be encouraged to submit feedback via the product feedback center."

Could be worse

they'll be encouraged to submit feedback via the product feedback center

In some ways I'd rather see these things organized "under one roof". As long as the product feedback center is responsive I don't think this is going to be a big deal for most.

Re:Could be worse

So what? If they want you to do the debugging for them via this method then it is up to us, the users, to satisfy that. If you do not want a part of it then do not participate. It is as simple as that. If there are people out there that are willing to look and submit bugs then the program is a success to Microsoft and that is all that matters here, how it helps Microsoft. Remember though, that is not a bad thing, it is just business.

Re:Could be worse

Fair enough, but Microsoft is trying to get street cred through a disingenuous use of the term "open source".

Except if you'd read TFA you'd see MS never even mentions the term "open source" or anything like it. They are very clear on what is and isn't offered and it being open source is certainly not one of thier cliams. That term come from a blog.

Re:Could be worse

Actually, they do mention the term open source(well, with a hyphen...In the context of saying "no, this is not open source". But hey, the blogger got a bunch of hits by suggesting otherwise, eh?

Re:Could be worse

Yes, you are right. This does not feel like "open source". You know why? Because it is not open source. Nowhere in their announcement do Microsoft claim it is open source. They even explicitly mention that it is not open source.

Re:Could be worse

If you can see the code, it's visible source. The word "open" has many different connotations. Open to view? Open to change? Open to redistribute? The open source community almost always assumes the latter two definitions, so Microsoft has done well by avoiding this loaded terminology. As you can see, the author of the article puts the words "open source" in Microsoft's mouth anyhow, because they knew it would cause controversy where there otherwise isn't any.

Re:Could Be Better

What issues are you talking about exactly? I've worked with .Net for six years and am unaware of "all kinds of issues"

Maybe he's talking about the IDE. I've run into lots of junk that hasn't been fixed for years. Things like .lic files becoming corrupted, loosing the ability to type non-word characters, source safe integration breaking, files in the .Net temporary directory getting locked, and projects loosing the ability to load DLLs. These are all design time problems, so my impression was they got a low priority and MS just decided to let us live with it.

More objective summaries

Seriously, most of us capable of seeing the negatives don't need help from the poster to see them. All those who don't see these licenses as not completely open source aren't going to have their minds changed by mini rants.

.NET is already open

You can already see all the source of the .NET framework using Lutz Roeder's Reflection tool. I use this all the time to see how the innards of functions work when something goes screwy with .NET.

If you're interested you can check out the free tool here: http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/ [aisto.com]

encouraged

they'll be
encouraged to submit feedback via the product feedback center

I do not think that word means what you think it means

Thanks, open source spin doctors

Nowhere in Microsoft's announcement do they in any way claim that they are releasing anything as open source. But hey, don't let that stop you from attacking Microsoft for not doing something they never claimed to do nor have any obligation to do.

I'm not following...

The Microsoft announcement says specifically and repeatedly that this is not "open source" and explains why they chose not to use such a license. They seem to understand the term a lot better than "whurley" does.

Need new terminology

We need to come up with a term for Open Source stuff that isn't quite open, just so we can avoid the confusion and dillution of the original term.

A few suggestions:

• Slightly Ajar Source
  
• Semi-Closed Source
  
• Partially Unshut Source
  
• Marginally Unobstructed Source
  
• Mostly Dehiscent Source
  

Okay, yes, I was just pulling words out of the thesaurus at the end there....

Re:Need new terminology

How about "Stripper Source"

You can look, but you can't touch!

So fucking what?

So they encourage you to report things to them rather than distributing a patch yourself. So what? Trolltech does this, MySQL does this, Sun does this, Mozilla does this; in fact virtually every significantly-sized open source project encourages you to fix problems through their own channels rather than throwing a patch around yourself. It's just good sense.

Remember IBM?

Rememeber IBM? They used to be the gigantic Evil Empire everyone thought would either become the overlords of humanity, or implode gloriously in a blazing fireball of liberation.

Instead they became just another business, later honorably defending (their contributions to) the Linux source code against the wretched SCO. Their interests have become more aligned with that of their customers.

I think Microsoft has less wiggle-room to remain viable than IBM did when they lost total domination over their market (because MS's business is mainly about using restrictive copyright licensing to make sure they're the only ones controlling the software on PCs, which quite different from what IBM's business is) but something similar is happening, however slowly and painfully.

Microsoft knows, to some degree, that in order to remain relevant it must give people access to the guts of its software. The software market has become far too complex for the ancient ways of floppies-in-a-box style business to work. However, as their Open.NET idea shows, they're still trying to keep as much control as possible, for as long as possible...

Just like MFC

The original 1991 team that developed the Microsoft Foundation Classes 1.0 (to go with the first Microsoft C++ compiler, and even before the first C++ Visual Studio) was planning to go completely "closed source." It makes sense from a library point of view to close access to the implementation, and only offer the interfaces in header files. However, I was one of the folks on that team that felt that since this was the first "thin" wrapper on the C Win32 API, it was more important to show just how thin that wrapper was, and to offer visibility into the MFC implementation. It wasn't "open source" but it was "source provided as documentation." You could still build MFC on Borland's Win32-ready compiler, in fact. Since I myself was fairly experienced with Win32 but not with C++ (as was the target market), I felt this was a reasonable compromise.

Before you throw eggs at me, let me point out that I then left that group before they invented CDocument and all the ugly MFC hell that has become associated with bloat. Before CDocument, it was essentially a reasonable alternative to STL with some HWND wrappers. Afterwards, the command-routing and OLE-managing framework turned almost any MFC app into a real rats' nest of unmaintainable spaghetti. I still wrote apps in MFC, but I have less and less stomach for it, in the rare instances I must develop Win32 at all.

Slashdot spin at its finest

I was wondering how slashdot would report this story. I knew that they would give it negative spin because it's not open source, but I didn't think they would actually try to suggest that Microsoft claimed that this was open source and then bash them for not meeting that claim.

Microsoft fully acknowledges that this code is to be released under MSRL, "Microsoft Reference Licenese", which Microsoft does not claim to be an open source license (it is not one of the Ms licenses that were submitted to OSI).

But the code is still valuable as it eases debugging. This similar to Microsoft's providing the source code to ATL, MFC, and their CRT. Much of this code was already available under Rotor2, but now we get lots more code, including WinForms and WPF, and more will be rleased in the future.

And it's not just code, but Microsoft including integrated debugging of .NET libs into VS 2008, including downloading the appropriate source from Microsoft's site on demand. There are other goodies as well.

See here for detaitls:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx [asp.net]

Re:Slashdot spin at its finest

It does introduce a big problem, though. Suppose someone's seen Microsoft's code, and in code they've written there's a stretch that's suspiciously similar to Microsoft's code. How does one go about proving that they didn't copy that code from Microsoft's in violation of the license? Access may be great for the programmer themselves, but if I'm not them and I'm using their code I suddenly acquired a big headache. And for me this isn't a theoretical excercise, I've been caught up in a lawsuit about exactly that sort of illicit propagation of code. I'd have to recommend not employing anyone for .NET work who's agreed to that license, and not using any .NET code created or touched by anyone who has, unless and until we've gotten our own license covering the Microsoft code in question. Anything else leaves too many legal question marks that're too easily avoided by just not tempting fate.

"We're the richest corporation on the planet..."

"No-o-ow... who wants to fix our bugs for free?"

[chirp chirp chirp]

"Anyone?"

[chirp chirp chirp]

These guys crack me up. Really.

Re:Wow, this is pretty good news.

Being able to see the source means that you can take the present tool kit and work around any bugs in a deliberate manner. Whereas without the ability to see the code you have to hope that the bug is what you think it is.

I would go one step further and say that it also lets you understand the behaviour of the framework where the documentation is inadequate or missing. I can see this being very useful, especially for those of us who like to fool about with less-commonly-used parts of .NET.
I also think that in the larger view, this is a great indication of shifting mentalities at Microsoft. I was pretty surprised to read "The security of the .NET Framework does not depend on the obscurity of the .NET Framework source code" in one of their press releases.

Re:IT a Trap! (Step 1 to kill Mono)

No offense intended, but I'm not sure how a post like this got modded so far up. Are we passing out tinfoil hats at the door now? (I know, I know. I must be new here.)

Let's take as a given that Microsoft would like all developers to be using their technologies. In their perfect happy world, every developer is using Visual Studio as their IDE, their language of choice is a .NET language, everyone's writing apps to run on Windows, etc. Microsoft all over the place.

In pursuit of that goal, is it more logical that they would make this move to:

A) Allow .NET devs to see/debug through the .NET libraries, making developing using their stuff more attractive to some subset of the developer community, or

B) Begin an intricate long-ranging litigation scheme against something like Mono, that even fewer developers than the subset in (A) know much about, that in no way is currently posing any kind of threat to their dominance (such as it is), on the off chance it might bear some kind of fruit years down the line?

Shit, Bond villains don't even bust out plans like the scenario you've concocted.

Sure, MS is greedy. Sure, they don't hold sacred the principles of freedom that you do. Sure, they may be evil -- but they're a generally *sensible* kind of evil, the kind that isn't building an elaborate cannon that shoots heads of lettuce while guns are available.

Re:IT a Trap! (Step 1 to kill Mono)

Out of curiosity, how much work have you done with Java and C#?

C# is to Java as Java is to C++ as C++ is to C on to infinity. To say that C# is just a copy of Java is about as much true and about as much false as saying Java is just a copy of C++. It is, and it isn't.

In each case you have a "new" language created based strongly on an old one, benefiting from the "mistakes" of the previous language.

The tricky part is, what's a mistake in the design of a language varies depending on your perspective and what you're trying to do it with -- and so the "evolved" language ends up better for some tasks and worse for others. Java addresses a ton of things that C++ doesn't do well (or require a much more seasoned C++ developer to do well), at the cost of becoming unsuitable (or at least, less suitable) for some uses, such as embedded programming or high-end game programming.

C# is that same kind of quasi-evolution from Java. It makes some things a lot easier to get right, but at a cost of giving up some of the things that are good about Java. The key here is that the differences between the two aren't as much in the base language's syntax as in the core frameworks/libraries that are built around them. That's what makes the chance to see more of what makes those libraries tick and why they made the design decisions they did interesting.

Try to understand whats going on please

These actions are intended on hurting Mono while pretending they intend on "helping". Whats going to happen is they are going to go through the Mono code and find anyone who agreed to this licencse and see if they contributed to Mono.

Its putting cheese in a mouse trap so they can do a SCO only for Mono, I advise nobody working on Mono go near this code. FOSS means the ability to see, modify and rediribute code, .NET is NOT open source: It is pretending to be open source.

Basically Microsoft is the "Intelligent Design" crowd of the software community, open source systems are growing in popularity and Microsoft knows they cannot destroy it from the outside (look at SCO) so they attempt to destroy it from within by pretending to be open like the "Intelligent Design" pretend to be scientific.

So Microsoft are attempting to skew the view of what open source is so they can attack it like the ID crowd attempts to confuse of what abiogenesis and evolution actually are so they can attack their little strawmen

How can you miss this? It's as clear as day! If you are working on the Mono project, stay away from the bait!

Re:Wise move by MS

And once that happens MS can help nuture a happy little band of developers, all sucking up MSDN licenced tools.

If you think they'll settle for that you are misled.

It was wise for Microsoft to release this code, yes. And it would be wise for open source developers not to touch it or .NET with a 10 foot pole. Candy from a stranger is stupid, candy from a known backstabber is beyond retarded.