Potatoes are more intelligent than grass because people can eat them - Gurdjieff
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Microsoft .NET lives up to open source promise
WHEN MICROSOFT talked about making .NET available under its Community Promise scheme, the free and open source software (FOSS) community looked upon the Vole with suspicion.
In theory the move allowed developers to use .NET without fear of being sued by litigious Voles.
At the time questions were raised as to why Microsoft's promise was not as good as an actual licence.
This week the Vole released its .NET Micro Framework under the Apache 2.0 licence, which means a sizeable chunk of .NET is now open source.
The .NET Micro Framework has the smallest footprint of all of Microsoft's .NET code bases and is designed for devices with very limited resources. It runs in just 300KB of memory and works on multiple CPUs. It has about 70 of the .NET classes.
The Vole is not releasing the whole stack. Another company apparently wrote the TCP/IP bits and and the cryptography libraries are missing, too.
However it is a bit of a leap for Microsoft to release anything that is compatible with the GPLv3. The Apache 2.0 licence also comes with a "perpetual royalty-free, irrevocable" patent grant.
Now the open sauce people are a bit confused about the Vole. There has got to be a catch here. µ
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One way or another...
All ur codes will belong to US!
There is always a catch.
Plus you could probably take the mono tcp/ip stack with some changes and apply it to this.
Anyways, this is intended for mobile phones and is meant to compete with java/android/etc for mobiles. It's probably more that microsoft has realized nobody is going to win the mobile phone os war anytime soon. If they can get .net onto more devices it at least allows them and other developers to have access to more devices.
Not every application needs to have Internet access to be able to provide a service.
TCP/IP?