According to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft will make the source for the upcoming .NET Framework 3.5 available under the Microsoft Reference License. This isn’t an open-source license (i.e. you couldn’t fork the code), but it is still a “good thing” in that developers can learn from the source and have an improved debugging experience with the ability to step-into the framework code.
Update: It seems that this isn’t seen as happy news by all. There’s an article on eWeek that’s just too irrational and frothing to pass up, claiming that this is all a ploy by Microsoft to kill Mono. As Microsoft is officially supporting Novell’s efforts in porting Silverlight to Linux (on top of Mono), the evidence would indicate that Microsoft is doing this to support .NET developers, and not as some clever conspiracy to kill off Mono.
October 11th, 2007 at 11:40 am
Well, the question is whether Microsoft will pursue a policy of “if you see our source, don’t write similar code”. If they do, then, yes, this would be a problem for Mono developers as they would have to actively ensure they never saw any .NET source code, whether intentionally or not.
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Dustin Puryear
Author, “Best Practices for Managing Linux and UNIX Servers”
http://www.puryear-it.com/pubs/linux-unix-best-practices