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Comment by sker | Hacker News Reader

What would it take for MS to make C# fully open source with no threat whatsoever of patent or copyright litigation? Is it really a strong selling point keeping companies using Windows? Now that MS is the underdog in the mobile wars, wouldn't it benefit them if developers of other platforms adopted C#?

They already gave F# away to the community. I don't see why they can't do the same thing with C# and hopefully all of .NET. Maybe the post-Ballmer MS will do it.

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This will be interesting to watch. The guy to keep tabs on is Scott Guthrie -- if C# (dotnet, rather) is going to go anywhere off the Win platform, it will be because Scott pushed it there.

It's a tough sell, though -- even with the underdog situation. Java took the approach of running everywhere, and Sun really didn't manage it well. I'm not sure MS is ready or able to participate in a world where the platform isn't the central ideology.

Any promise they make not to sue would be worthless - since they can always just create a shell company (to which such promises would "not apply"[1]) and sue anyway.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/patent-war-goes-n...

Ballmer and Microsoft has always threatened Linux with patents; and worse, they have refused to name which ones. There really is no reason to risk such contamination. So even if they made a patent grant, you wouldn't really see a lot of adoption.

Actually, they have already given a patent grant for C# and .Net. Nobody cared, except the Ximian guys (now Xamarin, which has always been an awesome team).

Not sure what you are looking for or mean by 'fully open source'. The .NET Framework libraries are open source, ASP.NET is open source, the C# compiler itself is closed is closed but it is an ECMA standard and there are open source implementations of it.

Can you show me the last C# ecma spec?

As far as I can see, the ECMA spec only goes to 2.0:

http://csharpindepth.com/articles/chapter1/Specifications.as...

They're only open source in the sense you can view them, but you definitely cannot do anything with them, edit them, compile them, etc (from what i can determine). Its purely for reference, not use.

Should be awesome!

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