Open Source? Say what?
I'm throwing away a pamphlet I got in the mail for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, OSCON.
"Open Source." Two little words for a big concept: that code can be owned by more than a single person or corporation. That a lot of people can get together to share in the contribution and ownership of a single product, merely by sharing the ingredients that it takes to make the product.
Well, that's nice. It's had a share of success. There are certainly a lot of people working for hard to make it into a screaming success.
Only, ... well, I'm looking at the topics they cover.
- Administration
- Business
- Databases
- "Emerging topics" (this means "Open Content", "Open Hardware" [?? your guess is as good as mine on that one], "Free Software in Africa", etc.)
- Java
- Linux
- PHP
- People
- Perl
- Programming
- Python
- Ruby
- Fundamentals
- Web applications
Do you know what's weird to me?
Microsoft .NET Framework is free. You don't even need Windows. You can run .NET code on Linux.
Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions are free. (Probably can't run that on Linux, but I know of lot of Eclipse programmers who use Windows.)
There are a lot of Windows boxes out there.
There are a lot of .NET programmers out there.
There is a lot of (wait for it...) free, open-source .NET code out there.
What's the deal, O'Reilly? Did I miss some weird definition of "open source?" Like, "studiously avoids anything and everything to do with Microsoft?"
No doubt somebody will come and tell me its all about the Righteous Fight Against Intellectual Property and the Problems With Patents and Who's Really Going To Benefit.
Uh-huh. Only now they're arguing against something else than the basic premise of what "open source" was supposed to be about. I can, if I like, start a 100% pure Open Source project, with Copyleft or GPL or whatever, have it in the public domain, open it up for open contribution, blah blah blah, all in the .NET Framework.
Put it this way. Go to Wikipedia (an "open content" encyclopedia) and look up "Open Source Definition". Or click here. Better still, go to the official (?) site: http://opensource.org/docs/osd. Take a gander at Item Number 6: "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor."
I guess that's true, except that it's okay to discriminate against Microsoft's fields of endeavors.
Okay, okay, okay! Back the truck up, Jack! I know I misapplied the intent of the OSD. Sheesh! Get your little fingers off the "flame" button on your keyboard.
But here's my point. So, you're an open-source advocate, and you're all about free and fair use of stuff. There's nothing stopping you from including stuff that's built on the .NET Framework. You're not forced into any weird licensing thing. Microsoft isn't going to sue you, and you won't be held liable from any attempt to sue Microsoft for some patent-infringement thing in .NET. Are you kidding? Someone would sue each of the millions of .NET programmers out there? Can you say "media nightmare for the plaintiff" when they sue humanitarian workers, faith-based organizations, nine-year old kids, ...? Do you think other people are saying, "Good for them!" at the RIAA's attempts to sue illicit song downloaders?
And don't tell me it's just against corporate ownership as a principle. Sun only recently completed turning Java over to open-source. Microsoft's .NET Framework is based on open works; the CLI and the C# language are both ECMA standards. That was years ago.
So I think you need to own up. Here's my "open-source" contribution to your movement. Call it what it is: the "Anything But Microsoft" or "We Refuse To Acknowledge The Existence Of A Large Software Company Based In Redmond, Washington" movement.
I use Java at work because I have to. I use .NET because I want to.
But that's the thing, isn't it? I don't mind saying I can work in both areas.
What you you, afraid that if you learn a little .NET programming that you'll become an evil capitalist pig?
Whatever.