[kwlug-disc] Microsoft .NET Micro Open Sourced ...

[Darcy Casselman]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Raul Suarez <rarsa at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Personally I think that they don't care about this technology. They found it useless so they are giving it away.
>
> They may not realize that creative hackers can make something useful out of it. They also know that many FLOSS people won't touch it just because the MS involvement.

Microsoft is a big company with competing priorities.  One of the
priorities is the platform strategy, which is what mostly drives Steve
Ballmer and has them doing all sorts of ridiculous, anti-Linux things
(not so much because they hate FLOSS, but because they hate
competition).  Another is the developer strategy, which is where this
falls in.

Microsoft wants developers to use its technologies.  Increasingly, the
developer teams within Microsoft are getting friendlier towards open
soure.  So they release things like ASP.NET MVC as open source.  They
hand over their Silverlight test suite to the Mono project so Miguel
can ensure compatibility in Moonlight.

These aren't throw-away technologies for Microsoft.  ASP.NET MVC is
what they're currently pushing as their next gen web development
platform.  Silverlight is strategically important, albeit slightly
ridiculous.

Darcy.