Most likely you have heard about Microsoft releasing the source of the BCL for viewing and debugging (563 comments!).
1) The first way to look at it is a lame way of trying to fend off critics who point to Java being open source. Being able to view the source is far from open source, and even far from “shared” source. I mean, I can pretty much view the source from Reflector anyway and while debugging through source is great… it’s not really useful since I can’t edit the source. The entire word debugging is based on fixing and removing bugs, so why debug over something you can’t affect?
2) This move is totally awesome if it is the first step to actually making the .NET framework open source in some way. I know it is never going to be released under the MIT or GPL license or anything… but let us compile it and submit patches. I could re-write .NET 2.0 url rewriting in a couple days and submit a kick-ass patch. Microsoft could still hold the keys and decide what gets released. Microsoft could even start doing more frequent releases, and give the public access to their source control repository. How awesome would that be?
Come on Microsoft. Take the next step.
-James
{ 3 comments }
2) ++
I have spent endless hours with Reflector trying to understand the inner workings of .NET Framework. There are many things not mentioned in the documentation that you really need to dig deeper to understand. Even though Reflector is brilliant, the real source code with comments and proper variable names would certainly be a big help.
We have also found several bugs in .NET Framework. With the source code, we could find them easier and write better bug reports to Microsoft.
I think #2 is on it’s way. Look at the recent open source .NET guys hired by Microsoft (Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack), I gotta think that is the way to compete against the RoR/Java/PHP world.
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