BREAKING: VS2013 Free; .NET, MSBuild, and CLR are open source; & updated patent grant

aidancheddar

aidancheddar

Active Member
This is unprecedented for Microsoft's entire history. Though, seems to be a continues trend with the latest version of .NET being open source, coming to Linux and Mac, and created the .NET Foundation. Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 is now 100% free under the Community name. I'm installing it now.

The Mono community was essentially forced to re-implement .NET because no open source implementation was available. Sure, the source code was available since Rotor but we didn’t use an OSI approved open source license, which made Rotor a non-starter. - .NET Blog
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VS2013 Community Notes
  • VS2013 does not change VS2010 projects or solutions.
  • VS2008 projects are not forced into migrating to VS2013, in contrast to VS2010.
  • Serial numbers are no longer asked, but you given a choice login.
  • Acccess to 5,000 existing extensions, Peek, Blend, Code Analysis, Graphical Debugging and full C# refactoring.

.NET Notes
 
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I see those posts Fatbag... you're surprisingly anti-corporate.

This won't mean much for us since we still need Monogame since XNA is dead, but I'm wondering what will happen to Mono itself.
 
This absolutely freaking awesome. The only thing that could have made me appreciate them more is if they made XNA open source too. I don't see why they put it down in the first place. :\
Rhys: Technically we don't "need" Monogame, because XNA 3.1 apps still run in Win7 and 8. But multi platform is a wet dream :)
 
Microsoft also produced an update to its patent grants, which further extends the scope beyond its previous pledges. Whereas before projects like Mono existed in a legal grey area because Microsoft's earlier grants applied only to the technology in "covered specifications", including strictly the 4th editions each of ECMA-334 and ECMA-335, the new patent promise places no ceiling on the specification version and even extends to any .NET runtime technologies documented on MSDN that haven't been formally specified by the ECMA group, if a project chooses to implement them. This permits Mono and other projects to maintain feature parity with modern .NET features that have been introduced since the 4th edition was published without being at risk of patent litigation over the implementation of those features. The new grant does maintain the restriction that any implementation must maintain minimum compliance with the mandatory parts of the CLI specification.
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