De-Ballmerization and Microsoft is oozing delicious developer love. What the hell happened. It's like Skeletor became He-Mans best buddy all of a sudden and started helping everyone.<p>I'm thrilled. The MS tooling <i>is</i> really, really good and the only thing stopping me from committing to the stack fully has been it's lack of open sourceness (vendor lock in is still feasible but getting less of an issue).<p>Edit: Pardon the fanboyism but I've tried a set of feasible Non-MS language options for my particular domain and F# in Visual Studio beats <i>for me, my particular use case and coding style</i> Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Python, Haskell, "browser technologies"...
I would be curious to see the effects of completely open-sourcing Windows. Businesses would continue to use it, because it's Microsoft and they want enterprise support. I think it would get even more love than it already does from the development community. Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already). Foreign governments who are concerned about NSA backdoors would have their fears allayed. Is there any way it could seriously damage their business model?
I wonder how this strategy is going to affect the bottom line of Microsoft. People writing with CLR languages are deploying web apps mainly (or only) to Windows now. They're going to have an option to deploy to Linux soon. This means less revenues from OS and DB licenses, so it looks bad. Do they expect a large number of people leaving Java, Node, Python, Ruby and picking up C# because of the Linux deploys? Those people would probably have to buy Windows and VisualStudio licenses to code in C# in a VM or just ditch Macs for PCs. More desktop licenses could make up for lost server ones but if I googled well a server costs more than a desktop. Or maybe they're playing a longer game: open source as much as they can, hope some network effect builds up, find out how to profit from it. In the medium term they might be losing money tough. Am I missing something obvious?
I am really interested to see what happens once ASP.Net is running on Linux. C# and Visual Studio are fantastic, mature tools and I think a lot of developers would enjoy using them whereas they might be hesitant at the moment due to OS lock-in on the code they are writing.
This post is a few hours old, but I just want to put it out there: We're hiring OPEN SOURCE ENGINEERS. I'm one and our job is awesome[1]. Please get in touch with me if you're interested[2].<p>[1]: <a href="http://instagram.com/p/yqQe0bK3Bq/" rel="nofollow">http://instagram.com/p/yqQe0bK3Bq/</a>
[2]: felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com
Quick link to what I think is the most interesting class in the CLR:<p><a href="https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/src/mscorlib/src/System/String.cs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/src/mscorlib/s...</a>
Interesting commit:<p><a href="https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/commit/90ef39bc3c9886e796748a65b4e530253190aeff" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/commit/90ef39bc3c9886e7967...</a><p>"This change fixes a potential problem in unwinding on Linux"
Noteworthy from the source: Microsoft does NOT use (unmergable) SLN-files for their projects, but instead scripts-msbuild invocations against specific projects:<p><a href="https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/build.cmd#L140" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/build.cmd#L140</a><p><a href="https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/build.cmd#L159" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/build.cmd#L159</a><p>I guess this explains why they saw no need to fix the somewhat broken SLN file-format in the first place, but actually did something about project-files. They don't share their customers pain on this point.
So I'm still a little fuzzy as to what this means. Is this basically the same thing that Mono is trying to provide? Would it now be possible to have the F# front end link to the CoreCLR backend on Linux?
This has all been set in motion during Ballmer.. Not from Ballmer himselve, but from inside out ( a lot of good employees there).<p>Now one of the guys pushing it, is CEO of Microsoft and we are finally seeing a (real) difference.. I joined the MS community a long time ago and this is (again) a heart warming addition!<p>Good job Microsoft, you're a bit late to the party. But no doubt, the ROI will show sooner or later! ;-)
I made a snapshot of a CentOS 6 box with CoreCLR cloned if anyone wants to play with it: <a href="https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/f34341a1b529a9141529cda0067678770dbd1894a247a33854cbf0907247819a" rel="nofollow">https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/f34341a1b529a9141529cda006...</a><p>Note: You'll need a terminal account to boot it, but it only takes 10 seconds to come online once you do that.
So I am not sure what this means to the end user but as another reader pointed out, Google and other companies in future could use .Net/C# as part of their mobile architecture. You could host .net sites on OSX or Linux, test them on a Mac. What else?
I wonder how this would aid projects such as IronPython and IronRuby if at all, just out of curiosity. My only dream is that they eventually have VS on Linux.
Great, but it's too late. .NET will still be the Windows-only technology. (I do know Mono) .NET becomes too big and too complex. I don't think it's easy to make it cross-platform.