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CoreCLR is now open source

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Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#261
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure they will migrate Visual Studio. First they'd need to move WPF, which is implemented in DirectX. Second, Visual Studio and MSDN are still profitable. Third, there's the Omnisharp project that;s working on providing support for the more common IDEs on linux. In fact, there's nothing stopping people from making Eclipse and IntelliJ plugins.

I wonder how long it will take a courageous developer to port WPF to OpenGL.

Check out https://github.com/grokys/Perspex

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think open source is great and I even admire Stallman because of not despite his single mindedness. I also don't think Windows being closed source is problematic. Choice is good and Windows is able to solve a particular set of problems efficiently by virtue of Microsoft's business model. That model fit my needs and interests for many years. Less so now because my needs and interests have changed to where the tradeo…

What kind of "choice" exists between open and closed source? Everything you can do with closed source software you can also do with open, and there are things you can't do with closed source.

>Everything you can do with closed source software you can also do with open, and there are things you can't do with closed source.

This is just not true. Show me a completely open source smart phone... thing is you can't, the baseband and radio will always for sure be closed source. There are markets where having knowledge that your competition doesn't is vital to success, that is why some things will always be closed source.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#263
post #17

This is on github. Does this mean that MS is abandoning CodePlex?

From other articles[1] it looks that way. Really makes you think how big github has become. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/15/codeplex_repository_...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8869401

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#265
post #48

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). F…

For one, it's big. When I was working on part of the UIPlat team for Windows, my private enlistment just included build infra and maybe 5% of the sources and associated tools/tests and it still took up 60+ GB (100+ GB with binaries). I don't think you can just throw it on Github.

Two, compatibility. Even if you fix a bug, it usually needs to be versioned in some way to avoid breaking apps that rely on the bug. OS code, once shipped, becomes feature. Fixes require a fair amount of due diligence besides just identifying the problem and the correct fix. The historical context of how the issue was introduced and how it has migrated to other branches needs to be understood by grepping through the source history graph. Suites of build verification tests, regression tests, integration tests, and unit tests need to pass. Although Microsoft has extensive infrastructure for buddy builds and integration staging, external parties won't. So at best they could suggest a fix to Microsoft to complete the due diligence on. But usually suggesting a fix is easy and vetting it is the grueling part.

Three, private forks of Windows seem like maintenance and compatibility nightmares. Fragmentation would likely disrupt windows update's ability to apply patches and keep the system secure. Windows' ability to run across so many devices is kept sane by keeping a relatively small, consistent trusted computing base. Merging together forked Windows repos is a disaster. The XBOX team forked Windows 8 for a few months and made some tweaks to get XBOX One out the door, and then some folks had the nasty job of having to try and consolidate the codebases against moving targets. No one has enough context or time to perform these kinds of merges individually, nor would ever volunteer to, so they need to be massive coordinated efforts between teams.

Four, variants. You're not going to want to deal with all the possible permutations of Windows SKUs, processor architectures (ARM/X86/AMD64/IA64), build flavors, etc.

Five, it's a mess. There's plenty of archaic cruft, possible trade secrets, and lurking vulnerabilities. Open sourcing everything would be like opening Pandora's Box. It's too risky. Curating out some portion of this to open-source would be a massive undertaking and ongoing maintenance cost.

I think it makes more sense to take more mature modules, like .NET core or Roslyn, and open source them as separate entities. Modules are more reusable, and community-driven changes are easier to curate when they can be isolated. Windows has some components which it probably makes sense to open-source, but the entity as a whole is too unwieldy in its current form. .NET is designed more modularly.

TL;DR - Windows is an unwieldy behemoth and would be difficult to open source.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#266
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't see why everything needs to be open source. I think this goes back to one of the core tenets of free and/or open source software: the user should be able to know, control, and modify exactly what their machine is doing. If the source is not available you're just running a black box and praying that it will do what the person who gave it to you claims it will do.

"If the source is not available you're just running a black box and praying that it will do what the person who gave it to you claims it will do." I'm sorry to point out to you but a large set of computing devices are black boxes and it does not hurt their marketability. Cars, phones (the OS running the hardware, not Android), ... the pilot in the passenger plane does not want to hack his planes OS, nor most likely d…

The reality of your software being a black box is not a matter of marketability. It is a matter of what you are able to know and control about what your personal machine is actually doing. Obviously there are manifest examples of people running all manner of black boxes, but as someone else pointed out, they are at the complete mercy of their black box vendor (unless someone wants to reverse engineer the box). If your vendor folds up and a critical vulnerability is exposed or is being openly exploited, well, congratulations on your new black brick.

On the other hand, if you have complete visibility into what your machine is doing and have the ability to modify it at will you can avoid all manner of failure scenarios that are essentially unrecoverable in the black box scenario.

We know people will run black boxes, drink poisoned sugar drinks, support genocidal megalomaniacs, torture others for limited monetary gain and/or endorphin rushes, etc. None of those realities imply that others should follow in the same footsteps, especially when there are workable alternatives that don't suffer from the same permanent failure scenarios.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#267
post #65

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. I'm thrilled. The MS tooling is 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). Edit: Pardon the…

[deleted]

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#268
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> De-Ballmerization and Microsoft is oozing delicious developer love. Kind of ironic, what with Ballmer's "Developers developers developers..." spiel.

When it comes to propaganda from large and powerful entities, usually it help to reverse the meaning to really understand the message. "Developers,developers,developer" = Fuck developers,need more profits next quarter. "We brought peace and democracy to country " = We seriously fucked it up for years to come, and installed a brutal puppet dictator. "We are not evil like those other mean companies. We will do good in…

The "new" Microsoft is supposed to be "cloud first" and "mobile first". Yet Azure has among the most lowest uptimes and Microsoft is dead-last in mobile. So you may be on to something there!

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#269

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?

I'm pretty sure mono is intending to replace parts of itself with coreclr...

My understanding was that Mono was the "open source CLR." What parts of Mono would this not cover? Once this project gets ported, what barriers to running .NET code on Linux/Mac/etc with performance and reliability comparable to Windows would remain?

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one "supports" it. People will improve the bits that bother them. In the aggregate, these activities amount to more than you could ever pay to have done. The beauty of open source model is it gives the desperately motivated the means to fix their problems in a way that benefits everyone.

It's all in isolation unless the trunk takes pull requests. Forking doesn't change that either. There's still got to be someone evaluating changes in light of their impact on 20 million lines of code.

^This. This is the hard part. Interdependencies and compat.
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