www.onjava.com/pub/a/dotnet/2001/06/27/dotnet.html -> www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2001/06/27/dotnet.html
NET 78 Open Source 79 Wireless 80 Bioinformatics 81 Atom Feed. NET, 2nd Edition * 91 Windows Server 2003 in a Nutshell * 92 C# in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition 93 More Traveling to a tech show? Program manager Dave Stutz says Redmond will work with Corel to develop the code. The announcement comes against a backdrop of Microsoft's recent attack on some aspects of open source software development, particularly against the GNU General Public License (GPL). Microsoft considers the GPL impractical for business because of what it calls its viral nature, which forces developers to return any modifications to the community. The day before the announcement, O'Reilly & Associates CEO Tim O'Reilly, Editor John Osborne, and O'Reilly Network's Rael Dornfest talked to Dave Stutz about Microsoft's first dip into the waters of public source. Dave Stutz: One of the things we've talked about, and has been lost in the noise of the GPL issue is that there are a number of positive things about the open source movement, and we've tried to learn from those things. But one of the other licenses we've been working on will be associated with the code base we're talking about today. In this type of license, the goal is to put the body of the content and get as much uptake as possible, both in commercial implementations of the CLI and/or the C# language, and in terms of non-commercial derivative work. Our intent is to have a license that is absolutely clear about people who want to look at the source code and then use what they've learned in their own source code. The licensing terms are designed so that people who want to do non-commercial ports to Linux can do so . FreeBSD has traditionally been an operating system that encouraged unencumbered experimentation. We're using it to prove the point that you can actually implement the CLI on Unix. It's been around a long time, people use it commercially. And the academic community is quite familiar with it as well. John Osborne: So you're favoring FreeBSD over Linux because of the licensing? Stutz: We have chosen FreeBSD because of licensing issues, yes. Stutz will speak on 115 a panel following Craig Mundie's talk on Microsoft's views on open source development and licensing. Dave will also speak at a session specifically on the ECMA shared source implementation. For more information, visit our 116 conference home page. Tim O'Reilly talks about how this came about and what he hopes to accomplish by bringing together Microsoft representatives and open source advocates at the 118 O'Reilly Open Source Convention. NET framework to the curious eyes of the developer world, but they're also signalling that they're willing to work more closely with the open source community. Since Microsoft intends to license the Common Language Infrastructure commercially itself, it wants to license any others who want to make a business out of it. Stutz: The terms of the licenses will be that if you're distributing it, you're distributing it for non-commercial use. However, if somebody wanted to do a commercial implementation of the CLI on Linux, they could certainly look at our shared source implementation and learn from it. But then, we would insist that they use their own code, in that case. Because we're in the business of making money on that, that's sort of where these restrictions on the commercial port side of it come from. If people thought they were interested in licensing the commercial version, or a commercial license of the shared source version. Appealing to academia and open source communities Throughout the interview, Stutz stressed the importance of offering code and tailoring a license that would appeal to the academic community. Tim: You've mentioned the academic community a couple of times. And I know from previous conversations with people at Microsoft that one of your biggest concerns about Java is its penetration in university computer science curricula. Stutz: We are certainly interested in making this something the academic community would embrace warmly. We believe there's a lot of interesting content in the CLI, lots of very interesting language infrastructure there. It's a nice modern language that fixes a lot of the things that were wrong with VB and fixes a lot of the things that were wrong with Java, and other languages that use runtimes in that way. So we definitely are trying to appeal to the academic community on this. Stutz: I think that in fourth quarter we'll have beta bits. Tim: So one of the differences between open source and shared source is no release-early, release-often? I think this is a pretty significant new development at Microsoft, this style of development. And if you're giving me advice that we should think about releasing it earlier and in a more broken state, I'm willing to take that advice to heart and think about that and take that back to the team. Stutz: We're definitely going to try to foster multiple communities around this code base. In an independent announcement last week, Microsoft has started with a thing that's called the shared development process. We will also certainly try to be part of the more traditional open source communities. Microsoft and the open source community have a history based on mutual suspicion. Tim: There's a lot of skepticism about the subject of Microsoft and standards. Just for example, recent moves, such as changes to the SAMBA protocol are actually patented, so that people can't reverse engineer it without running into patent infringement. These are the kinds of things that make people say, are these really standards, or are they just standard when you can't get people by the short hairs? And I think that's a great word to use for standards groups. Standards bodies don't exist just to stamp an existing implementation. They exist so that the members can actually work out consensus among themselves. And that is something we have been very good for the last n number of years. We've really tried to create a basis based on standards coming from recognized standards organizations. I think that it's not fair to characterize us as someone who's not playing by the rules. We're definitely trying to be a good citizen when it comes to participating in these standards bodies, and now in granting our intellectual property into them. I guess what I'm trying to address is the feeling that whenever Microsoft says we'll play the standards game here, where's the other shoe? Where's the other piece that you think is going to be where the real value is? And there's a pretty clear dividing line between their standards work and their proprietary software. Stutz: I think there's a very clear dividing line in our case as well. Yeah, but when you take something like Kerberos and you say, let's extend it a little bit and -- Stutz: No, no, no. The Kerberos case is that, as part of the standards creation process it was recognized that all vendors would be interested in having an extensibility hook so that they could essentially incorporate their own native authentication into the Kerberos web of trust. And we are willing to strike business deals with people who want to strike a business deal for that implementation detail. Tim: It seems to be one of the sore points that people keep coming back to. Stutz: There seems to be this belief that people should just give away what they've done to differentiate themselves, arbitrarily. And we're very up front about working with standards organizations and moving those standards forward. And at the same time, we are interested in having things that will allow us to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace and have a sustainable business model. I think there is a trust issue that goes back to the Halloween Documents. Stutz: There may be, with some communities, a trust issue. One of the intents of the project I'm working on, the CLI implementation, is to start to reach out to those communities. The offerings include: * the ECMAscript compiler, written in C#, which runs on both platforms (Windows, FreeBSD) * the C# compiler, which also runs on both platforms * and the shared-source CLI. NET * Windows Forms Also, there are high performance mem...
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