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Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think it's been closed source with minimal cross platform effort? Most of everything from Microsoft related to C# is open source. This includes their compiler, the runtime, and the framework and libraries. And it's been this way since 2014. The .NET standard itself has always been open and cross platform implementations like Mono go back to 2004! I'm not sure what you mean by 'heavyweight.' Its performance is head to head with C++.

Here's the primary repo for .NET goodies: https://github.com/microsoft/dotnet

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And if anybody downvoting could take a second to actually chime in, it would be illuminating. From my perspective all I see an immense amount of misinformation about the language, and I'm genuinely curious what people may not like about it.

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I know little on this topic, but as you were looking for some feedback I thought I would response.

Because the Microsoft version was closed source for a long time?

It was released in 2000. You give 2014 as the open source date, which was only 4 years ago.

Woolvalley was referring to the implementation, so bringing up the specification is not that relevant.

The ECMA specification does (did?) not include ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows Forms. The implementation of those APIs were potentially covered under patent, as the Microsoft Community Promise did not apply.

As Wikipedia points out, "These technologies are today[when?] not fully implemented in Mono and not required for developing Mono-applications, they are simply there for developers and users who need full compatibility with the Windows system." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Mono_and_Micro... .

While that point is moot today, that is part of the history which guides current views.

If by C# you mean the ECMA specification, then that's different than C# as available for Windows by Microsoft.

Is C# a first-class citizen on Linux comparable to how Visual C# is a first-class citizen on Microsoft Windows, or how C++ is a first-class citizen on Linux? I don't have the experience with that, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

What languages do you consider to be "first-class" and "second-class" on Linux?

Much appreciated!

One clarification, since my own language was sloppy. C# did not get open sourced in 2014. That was the date that Microsoft open sourced just about everything (and that's a weasel word there - to my knowledge, it is everything) that wasn't already open source. Things like ADO/ASP/Windows Forms/etc were open sourced back in 2008, along with Microsoft's implementation of their framework libraries, which Mono rapidly integrated into their implementation.

And so on that note, much of that information on the Wiki page is outdated by at least a decade. Mono, especially since their 2.0 release (back in 2008), has been a fully fleshed out, cross platform, production ready alternative to Microsoft's implementation. So I certainly wouldn't call C# a second class citizen on Linux by any means. The one and only reason Linux is not my primary development platform is the lack of Visual Studio.

Ultimately C# started out pretty awful. The language was a mediocre java clone, performance was abysmal, and the language itself was lacking in features. But that changed relatively rapidly, and certainly today it bears little resemblance to where it started. And I think that is perhaps the problem, people seem to think C# of today is the C# of 2004, but I don't understand why that degree of misinformation is so strongly exemplified in this particular language. I think it's particularly a shame because of what a successful tool the language has evolved into.

You wrote "Things like ADO/ASP/Windows Forms/etc were open sourced back in 2008".

Could you explain that further? It appears to contradict this ZDNet article from 2014, http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-open-source-more-o... , which says:

> Microsoft to open source more of .NET, and bring it to Linux, Mac OS X

> Microsoft is porting its server-side .NET stack to Linux and Mac OS X, and is making more of that stack available as open source. ...

> In April 2014, Microsoft announced plans to open source a number of its developer technologies , including ASP.NET, the Roslyn .NET compiler platform, the .NET Micro Framework, .NET Rx and the VB and C# programming languages. ...

> Microsoft is not planning to open source the client side .NET stack, which means certain pieces like the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Forms won't be going open source,

Here's another link from 2014, this describing how .NET Core was made open source. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2014/11/12/net-core-... . It says:

> As a .NET developer you were able to build & run code on more than just Windows for a while now, including Linux, MacOS, iOs and Android.

> The challenge is that the Windows implementation has one code base while Mono has a completely separate code base. 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. Customers have reported various mismatches, which are hard to fix because neither side can look at the code of the other side. This also results in a lot of duplicated work in areas that aren’t actually platform specific.

This would seem to contradict your statement that "Things like ADO/ASP/Windows Forms/etc were open sourced back in 2008, along with Microsoft's implementation of their framework libraries, which Mono rapidly integrated into their implementation."

Here's another page, describing the difficulties before .NET Core, http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/why-is-dot-net-core-imp... :

> Previously, 'cross-platform' with Microsoft was a joke - it was cross-platform but only within the Microsoft Windows operating system family. .NET Core brings the true cross-platform compatibility, which means you can have one single source code base on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is a huge deal, especially between Windows and Linux - it gives you more choice for deployment, hosting, and scaling.

> By making its fundamental codebase open source, Microsoft is giving .NET developers an incredible opportunity to enter into areas with their existing skills which were previously locked off to them. The opportunities presented are only going to start to emerge over the next months and years - it's well worth your while checking it out and taking .NET Core for a spin.

Now, certainly it's possible that you are correct, and these are all parts of the misinformation derived from the early days of C# and .Net.

If so, could you provide some references? Otherwise it's very easy for me to conclude that you misremember the historical details.

Sure, here's an article from Microsoft describing how to access and view the source code for their library implementation, ASP/ADO/Forms/etc: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/net-framework-library-source... That's from January 2008. This release is specifically what enabled Mono to really go to the next level, more than a decade ago. You can even see the little 'carve out' they made in the license to ensure Mono, in particular, could use the code down in the 'Reference License' section.

You're making a reasonable mistake of confusing .NET Core with the .NET Framework. They're different things. .NET Core is a new development that is not directly compatible with applications relying on the .NET Framework. As you can read on the blog post you linked to, .NET core was announced as open source before it was released -- which was 2015. Its implementation and technologies being open sourced is something altogether different.

The link you gave is indeed to view the source. It is not, however, an open source license, as characterized by the OSI or DFSG, nor free software as characterized by FSF.

Here is the license - https://referencesource.microsoft.com/license.html . It contains obviously non-open source clauses like:

> "Reference use" means use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products with the software, and specifically excludes the right to distribute the software outside of your company.

Microsoft agrees that (quoting from a quote in my earlier comment) "the source code was available since Rotor but we didn’t use an OSI approved open source license, which made Rotor a non-starter".

Like I said, I know little about this topic. However, I think you do not understand what open source means.

I'm pretty sure that when woolvalley used the phrase "It has been for the longest time been a closed source MSFT only thing", that "closed source" meant "not open source according to OSI or similar guidelines." Not "available in source code form", which is what you seem to think it means.

From my perspective here, you're shifting the goal posts. In particular this conversation began with you apparently thinking that Mono lacked full implementations of ASP/ADO/etc. And I think that might justify the original comment that Linux implementations have been treated as second class citizens. I say might since ADO/ASP are not really part of .NET, but rather independent projects built on top of .NET. But in any case, that hasn't been an issue for many years now.

You have now shifted into claiming that your issue is that the licenses Microsoft released their code under were insufficiently permissive. I could argue against this, because it's at best misleading -- different code was released under different licenses. You can see an archive of one of the CLI releases [1] with the license it came with. Or this [2] is a blog from the Mono founder expressing thanks for Microsoft and ECMA members releasing code under open source licenses. That blog was from the huge 2.0 release, in 2008.

But ultimately that feels like a red herring, even if a fun one! You seemed to believe (as did the person I was responding to) that C# was a Windows only thing. That hasn't been the case for a very long time, and it is completely ridiculous now a days. In either case, it might seem we agree if you think that people are basing their views on obsolete information. But that then rather begs the question of why is that so especially the case here. If I was discussing e.g. javascript frameworks from the perspective of somebody 4 years out, let alone a decade, I'd be quite justifiably skewered. In other fields, 4 years ago things like TensorFlow did not even exist as public projects. 4 years is a very long time in software, so why are people so particularly slow on the uptake in this instance? Bias, bad marketing, something else?

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20060421052106/http://www.micros...

[2] - http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Oct-06.html

You asked for possible reasons for why you are being downvoted for your reply to the following comment by woolvalley: "It has been for the longest time been a closed source MSFT only thing. It wasn't open source and running on linux was a second class citizen. Not sure if it is still a second class citizen."

Your reply was: "Why do you think it's been closed source with minimal cross platform effort?"

I don't think you can argue that I'm shifting the claim to the topic of being insufficiently permissive when that was part of the original thread.

The license[1] that you pointed to is not open source. It says "You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes".

Again, just because the source code is available, that doesn't mean it's open source. There are few that would agree with you that the early Microsoft licenses you pointed to meet the usual criteria for "Open Source" as it's used in the industry.

Your argument seems to be that things have changed and we should forget about the history. As woolvalley's comments were made in the past tense ("wasn't open source", "was a second class citizen"), I think you could have made a better reply along the lines of "a lot has changed since you last looked into C#", rather than the more accusative approach you did which challenges a viewpoint which seems to be historically justified.

I find the idea that "4 years is a very long time in software" to be laughable.

I've been using Python since the late 1990s, and am still going through the Python 2->3 upgrade cycle. My primary development environment of a Unix-like terminal environment and emacs would be recognizable to people in the 1980s. I've been developing and selling my software product for 8 years, with essentially the same core codebase.

Or, going down that rabbit hole, Alan Kay is famous for arguing that there is little in the way of significant new inventions in computing since 1980. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i... .

In hindsight, something I think I should have emphasized in our discussion earlier is the exact state of Mono. Everything else is mostly tangential as 'the Mono question' essentially closes the discussion of whether C# was a 'mostly closed source Microsoft only thing.' And I think the evidence is bountiful and evident that Mono has long since been a very well developed production ready environment.

Just listing a few projects built on it should really suffice to make the point. The Sims 3 was built using Mono and launched in 2009, Second Life went live with it in early 2008, Unity swapped to it after their initial 'front end' language began, in their words, "proving to be too slow and unwieldy." Their original language, quite appropriate for this topic, was Python! There's really an infinite room for discussion about this, but I think it's all a subset of the 'The Mono Question.' For instance your issue on exactly what open source license is used is completely redundant given Mono.

As for your divergence on 4 years not being a long time. I personally do agree. But our agreement stands in contradiction to the standards of software today. Entire languages are born and die in this span, libraries that didn't exist become ubiquitous, and in general 4 years is certainly far longer than necessary to expect some reasonable evolution of adaptation and opinion. The fact it has not is a peculiarity I find bemusing, and fun to consider. If nothing else, it leads to enjoyable discussion - which I suppose is the ultimate point of these forums.

Yes, that would have been appropriate as woolvalley specifically brought up Microsoft, and your reply talked a lot about Microsoft's source available release as if it were meaningful counter-example to woolvalley's reference to "closed source."

You wondered why you got downvotes? That's why.

I have no dog in this race.

If you "personally do agree" then why do you bring up an argument that you disagree with, in order to justify your views? It comes across as if you are making the argument to win some sort of rhetorical point, where the end - your advocacy of C# - justifies any tactic.

I do not care to follow up on this discussion any longer.

Mono is a product of the open source nature of C#, not the cause. In general, I think its wise to go as close to the 'first party reason' as possible. But the nuance there makes it surprisingly intricate, and nuance is often lost in online discussion...

As for '4 years being a long time in software', there's a difference between considering the industry at large, and individual experience. I, like everybody, have anecdotal experience and opinions that run contrary to the norm. And in this case my personal view is that 4 years is not really a long time in terms of software, yet for the industry and people as a whole, I think that couldn't be further from the average truth.

Sure, been a fun discussion!

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