Microsoft today announced plans to open source .NET, the company's software framework that primarily runs on Windows, and release it on GitHub.
Furthermore, Microsoft also unveiled plans to take .NET cross-platform by targeting both Mac OS X and Linux. In the next release, Microsoft plans to open source the entire .NET server stack, from ASP.NET 5 down to the Common Language Runtime and Base Class Libraries. The company will let developers build .NET cloud applications on multiple platforms; it is promising future support of the .NET Core server runtime and framework for Mac and Linux.
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There are certainly some interesting developments coming out of Microsoft at the moment. This, Windows 10 being opened to the public, for free, for feedback during development, and the latest IE build having broader ES6 support than both Chrome Canary and Firefox Nightly are prime examples of this.
I'm looking forward to when the .NET Framework is fully open sourced - this will mean that we may actually be able to provide a portable .NET Framework, and thus completely portable .NET software.
If Microsoft will not open the source of .net framework, can we use mono-project for .net applications to make them fully-portable?
If microsoft will open the source code of .net framework that would be good news for WINE and mono-projects...
Microsoft are definitely in the process of open-sourcing the .NET Core (and other .NET stuff, but we are only interested in the Core), but there are some issues that may continue to make it impossible to fully support a portable .NET Framework.
.NET Core is a subset of the .NET Framework, so it does not include all functionality, thus some .NET apps will fail for no visible reason when running on .NET Core. This is also the reason we can't use Mono, because it does not replicate the full set of Framework functionality and some apps will refuse to work on it.
Microsoft have stated that they expect Framework features to appear in the Core through community-assisted development, but there will still be a period (possibly years) before all functionality can be implemented.
There is also the possibility that Microsoft may reject some Framework features from entering the Core code (bad idea because developers will just jump over to Mono or a direct fork of .NET Core, but Microsoft have made worse decisions in the past).
Potentially Microsoft may even continue to implement new Framework features outside of the open sourced Core (I hope not, but it may happen). If that happens then there may always be a gap between Core feature and Framework features.
Even if Microsoft don't do something silly along the way, we will still need to pick an unofficial build to use (or someone here may have to build it themselves).
There are a lot of variables here - if everything works the way I hope then we may one day have a viable portable .NET, if not we may never see a portable .NET. We just have to wait and see.
They did this with Windows 7 as well. First time I tried Win7 was a free dev/RC version, downloaded directly from Microsoft. Didn't like it though.
Typical "Embrace, extend, extinguish" mantra. Offer something to all platforms, but have an extended version only on yours. What is coded on other platforms will work on yours. What is coded on yours - fails on others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
My posts are old and likely no longer relevant.