Microsoft ASP.NET vNext Is Open-Source, Runs On Linux

[Mike Frett]

Yeah, it's Microsoft... so? Are they really any worse than Google, Apple, Oracle or any big tech company? ... they're not the same old evil-empire that a lot of people still seem to think of them as.

Yeah, they are. And they are the same, if not worse, old company we've known all these years. Still locking users in, still telling developers not to use Linux, still threatening OEMS who try to use a different OS and still pretending to care about Open Source while secretly trying to discredit and destroy it.

Only weak and ignorant people use Microsoft products and that old, outdated crutch called Windows. Thankfully times are changing, the Desktop isn't that important anymore where Microsoft is the all-ruling King of slavery. Mobile is the future for most people and Mobile is where Microsoft no longer rules in ANY significant manner. Microsoft's time is very limited at this point, and thank goodness, it's about time.

[dee.]

Well, just look at the numbers. They still dominate the desktop, but they're slipping - due to the disaster that is Windows 8, very little of their customer base is using the latest version of Windows; most of those migrating off the now-dead XP are going to 7. And while WP8 is more successful than it's predecessors, they're still struggling in mobile. It's a company in a completely different position from that which saw them dominating the industry for so long.

Really, when it comes to companies that worry me, they've slipped a long way down the list... behind Oracle, behind Google, behind Apple...

So you're saying their enormous patent portfolio, enormous financial and legal resources and existing infrastructure, etc. do not matter?

They're still playing just as dirty as before... Xbox one, Skype... those things are still profitable for Microsoft. They have their own hardware production, those ms keyboards and mouses are ubiquitous in supermarkets. Their OS is ubiquitous on all sold desktop and laptop computers. And that's all very scary when you consider their extremely close NSA ties. Almost all of MS products have been found to contain NSA backdoors.

The question isn't whether you should be worried about MS, but you definitely should be worried about NSA, and MS is very useful to NSA...

[Luke_Wolf]

They have their own hardware production, those ms keyboards and mouses are ubiquitous in supermarkets.

Actually MS Keyboards are usually pretty nice for not being mechanical, and they had the best trackball mice.

Their OS is ubiquitous on all sold desktop and laptop computers. And that's all very scary when you consider their extremely close NSA ties. Almost all of MS products have been found to contain NSA backdoors.

The question isn't whether you should be worried about MS, but you definitely should be worried about NSA, and MS is very useful to NSA...

You mean like any other major tech company, including Google, Apple, et al? Seriously though the NSA already knows who you are, where you sleep, your movement patterns, who you talk to, and has a voice and face pattern associated with you, and soon your fingerprint through these amazing little tracking and listening devices known as smartphones which *everyone* has at this point, and even if you have just a basic cellphone they can still listen in on you and watch you through the camera, and are listening in on your calls and texts, and there's nothing stopping them building a profile based upon other people's phones recording you. Also unless you go to rather extreme measures and don't do any surfing from your phone they know which websites you visit, your porn preferences, and all sorts of other fun information because Google has this amazing little script called google analytics which runs everywhere (and that's not even getting into the various adserver scripts and such) and Google was more than happy to sell the information to them. If that's not enough we have drones up overhead. Fact is everyone got screwed over by the Baby Boomers and the so quote "Greatest Generation" because they were more than willing to bend over to the government over the red scare which saw the creation of the trifecta of US spy agencies more commonly known as the NSA, CIA, and FBI, and who refused to stand up against projects like Eschalon when there was still a hope of privacy. At this point unless you go to extreme measures you have no privacy, and even with extreme measures you might not.

[Filiprino]

Clearly you've got no clue what the Apache license actually says but what should I expect from someone spreading Sun Microsystem's baseless FUD? Intelligence? Reading Comprehension? Understanding of how the patent situation actually stands with an entity that wants you to use it's software? I guess none of the above.

From the Apache License:

In other words unless you try to sue Microsoft, yes it does. Now go cry to Oracle and Sun Microsystems who actually both sued over Java, as opposed to Microsoft who has done no suits involving .NET,

Maybe you should read again that license term.

3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

Not to mention other parts of software and license.

[Filiprino]

GPL doesn't forbid you to sell software. It's not a problem for software sales. People already get for free the software even if they aren't allowed to do so (piracy they call it). No OEM would risk itself to sell computers with an unsupported fork of a theorical GPL MS Windows, except if the manufacturer is big enough to sustain in great condition its own fork, which at the moment is not the case and never will be, just see what's happening on Android, trying hard to not break compatibility with AOSP, barely modifying it except for adding their own GUI. Companies using Android must pay Google to include Google Apps. Microsoft could do similarly with other aspects of Windows (updates, access to Windows Update, whatsoever).

GPL would allow us to trust more the software we use every day, and the companies which make the software would get more support and more polished software.

[directhex]

Apache License doesn't mean free of patents.

Clause 3 of the Apache 2.0 license:

3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

This is pretty much the same patent grant language as found in GPLv3

[dee.]

Actually MS Keyboards are usually pretty nice for not being mechanical, and they had the best trackball mice.

Thanks for shilling, mr. shill!

You mean like any other major tech company, including Google, Apple, et al?

No, not like them, actually. Microsoft has much closer ties to NSA than any other tech company. Of course, that doesn't mean that others are innocent, but just because others also do bad things, doesn't absolve ms from their sins, and it doesn't mean that they are all equal. MS is in a close partnership with NSA, willingly and gladly co-operates with them, informs NSA of all known exploits before patches are published, implements backdoors for them... others - like google, apple, etc. - may also have problems wrt. privacy and NSA, but none of them go quite as far and have such a deep relationship with NSA as MS.

Seriously though the NSA already knows who you are, where you sleep, your movement patterns, who you talk to, and has a voice and face pattern associated with you, and soon your fingerprint through these amazing little tracking and listening devices known as smartphones which *everyone* has at this point, and even if you have just a basic cellphone they can still listen in on you and watch you through the camera, and are listening in on your calls and texts, and there's nothing stopping them building a profile based upon other people's phones recording you.

No, actually they don't. Because I happen to not be an idiot and do not sprinkle about my personal information on facespace and other social circlejerk services. I also take care of my privacy online and don't use any of my online accounts on my cellphone.

Also unless you go to rather extreme measures and don't do any surfing from your phone they know which websites you visit, your porn preferences, and all sorts of other fun information because Google has this amazing little script called google analytics which runs everywhere (and that's not even getting into the various adserver scripts and such)

Ghostery, Noscript, Adblock. Bam - problem solved. Next!

and Google was more than happy to sell the information to them. If that's not enough we have drones up overhead.

There are no drones in Finland and if I see one I'll shoot it down.

Fact is everyone got screwed over by the Baby Boomers and the so quote "Greatest Generation" because they were more than willing to bend over to the government over the red scare which saw the creation of the trifecta of US spy agencies more commonly known as the NSA, CIA, and FBI, and who refused to stand up against projects like Eschalon when there was still a hope of privacy. At this point unless you go to extreme measures you have no privacy, and even with extreme measures you might not.

Well, that was quite a nice little apologia there. Hey, look everyone, we're already completely fucked by the government (which is in large part resulting from the fact that your government in USA has been mostly taken over by corporatism and crony capitalism) so it doesn't matter if we get fucked by corporations too! Who cares if microsoft invades our privacy, we can't do anything about it so we might as well just bend over!

You're commiting so many logical fallacies I can't even begin to count them.

Firstly: Just because we can't guarantee perfect privacy, just because we can't protect our civil rights perfectly, doesn't mean that we should just throw all of them away and not care about any of them. There are more levels and grades of privacy between "100% perfect" and "none". When you use Microsoft Windows, you're vulnerable to all the backdoors, all the exploits that microsoft willingly exposes to NSA. If you don't use windows, no, you may not get perfect privacy either - but you'll get a hell of a lot more than you get with it.

Secondly: just because other corporations also make bad things, doesn't mean we should treat all corporations the same. Some do less bad things than others, and we can put them in order of how harmful, dangerous and unethical their practices are. Guess where microsoft stands in this ranking?

Thirdly: Microsoft is one of the most unethical, despicable, harmful organizations ever to exist and should be condemned and judged for crimes against humanity. They have done so much harm to mankind by their unethical, borderline criminal practices, lobbying, slander, FUD, threats, extortion, patent/copyright trolling, et cetera, that the list is seriously too long to write down here. The sooner we get rid of that ugly stain in the history of the world, the better. And no, I don't care if you think they have "pretty nice trackballs" or whatever. I really don't. If you value temporary comfort more than your civil rights, privacy, openness, freedom, transparency, that's your problem and something you have to work out by yourself. But don't give me those bullshit justifications that are being spread by ms astroturfers and shills and PR teams. They've been rebunked countless times already and will continue to be rebunked everywhere

[ihatemichael]

well i prefer C/C++ always but i heard many good things about vala(would be nice to replace android java core) on the other hand if i were xamarin i would focus entirely on IOS/Android(maybe) cuz in linux C#is a no go from long long time ago and i doubt that will ever change specially since QT5 has gotten really really good with C++ and QML lately

Qt5.

Get it right.

[nullone]

same company

You lack imagination. They are not trying to promote Linux, they are trying to promote .NET.

So nothing has changed.

[nullone]

Yeah, it's Microsoft... so? Are they really any worse than Google, Apple, Oracle or any big tech company? Remember, they've been through several changes of leadership in past years, and slipped from their position of dominance... they're not the same old evil-empire that a lot of people still seem to think of them as.

In this case, it's not hard to see what they're doing. Their platform is a very distant third when it comes to mobile, and to change that, they need to convince developers to use their toolchain, to build apps with C# and the rest. They're not trying to promote Linux - but if they can get Linux developers using .NET to build apps for Windows Phone, it's an improvement for them. And they probably *don't* have a bunch of hidden gotchas, because they can't afford to antagonise people by using dirty tricks to lock them in.

Essentially, what I'm saying is that MS are currently in the position of "don't be evil" because being evil would only weaken their position further...

So you think what shall be or better to be for MS in your eyes, is MS what is now?

Tell a person or campny by what it does is better than what it says or what you think. The fact is more perswuding than "they probably *don't* ...."