End of the World? Microsoft Open Sources .NET!
Yep, must be here, the end of the world that is… Microsoft Open Sourcing .NET. Yep… we’re done.
How The Worm Turns — Microsoft Open Sources .NET
Forbes – Ben Kepes – “It seems like several lifetimes ago that Bill Gates, then CEO of Microsoft, declared that Linux (and, by extension, open source) was a cancer for the technology industry. The Microsoft of today increasingly embraces open source initiatives as a valid approach to some problem areas for technology. But embracing open source, and open sourcing some of the crown jewels of the organization are two different things and that is what Microsoft announced this week
The company announced that it places to open source most of the full server-side .NET core stack, beginning with the next version (note though, this does not include the client-side .NET). The .NET framework is an incredibly important programming language, while looking at young startups one might be forgiven for thinking that newer, more agile languages had removed the validity of old stalwarts like .NET, the truth is very different. There are many huge enterprises out there that run the bulk of their enterprise applications on .NET, and those organizations aren’t moving any time soon. Microsoft .NET had however lost a degree of credibility among the indie developer set and hence this move looks like an attempt to reinvigorate .NET among these folks. A reported six million developers build on top of the .NET framework, but Microsoft’s corporate VP of the developer division, Soma Somasegar, believes that open sourcing .NET will be the way to move the framework forward.
The open source .NET will be broadened to run on both Linux and Mac OS X. Microsoft is planning on working with the Xamarin-sponsored Mono community which already produces a cross-platform open source .NET framework – interestingly this is yet another coming together of Microsoft and Xamarin – I’ve long suggested that Xamarin will eventually be acquired by Redmond, as Microsoft deepens its open source commitment this looks ever more likely.
This move plays into many different hands – it both opens .NET up to more developers, but also across more partnerships. Two examples, Microsoft’s Cloud tsar Scott Guthrie admitted that “often tell Microsoft that while they like .NET, many don’t use it because it’s closed-source and only supports Windows. After [this move], all the reasons not to use it have disappeared”. And it even plays into the hands of the exciting Docker space. Said Docker’s head of business development Nick Stinemates, ‘a central value of the Docker open platform is application portability to any infrastructure via Docker containers. The delivery of an open-source .NET runtime across all major OS platforms means that Microsoft is extending the concept of portability to the application platform itself’.
In what would have been met with incredulity only a few short years ago, Somadegar suggests that developers will soon be able to run a .NET app in a Docker container in Linux on Microsoft Azure – that’s a Microsoft we’ve not seen before. It’s a positive sign that the old, black and white lenses about open source and proprietary software no longer hold true. An exciting day for the technology industry.”