by Miguel de Icaza

Today, Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft is open sourcing .NET. This is a momentous occasion, and one that I have advocated for many years.

.NET is being open sourced under the MIT license. Not only is the code being released under this very permissive license, but Microsoft is providing a patent promise to ensure that .NET will get the adoption it deserves.

The code is being hosted at the .NET Foundation's github repository.

This patent promise addresses the historical concerns that the open source, Unix and free software communities have raised over the years.

.NET Components

There are three components being open sourced: the .NET Framework Libraries, .NET Core Framework Libraries and the RyuJit VM. More details below.

.NET Framework Class Libraries

These are the class libraries that power the .NET framework as it ships on windows. The ones that Mono has historically implemented in an open source fashion.

The code is available today from http://github.com/Microsoft/referencesource. Mono will be able to use as much a it wants from this project.

We have a project underway that already does this. We are replacing chunks of Mono code that was either incomplete, buggy, or not as fully featured as it should be with Microsoft's code.

We will be checking the code into github.com/mono by the end of the week (I am currently in NY celebrating :-)

Microsoft has stated that they do not currently plan on taking patches back or engaging into a full open source community style development of this code base, as the requirements for backwards compatibility on Windows are very high.

.NET Core

The .NET Core is a redesigned version of .NET that is based on the simplified version of the class libraries as well as a design that allows for .NET to be incorporated into applications.

Those of you familiar with the PCL 2.0 contract assemblies have a good idea of what these assemblies will look like.

This effort is being hosted at https://github.com/dotnet/corefx and is an effort where Microsoft will fully engage with the community to evolve, develop and improve the class libraries.

Today, they released the first few components to github; the plan is for the rest of the redesigned frameworks to be checked in here in the next few months.

Xamarin and the Mono project will be contributing to the efforts to bring .NET to Mac, Unix, Linux and other platforms. We will do this as Microsoft open sources more pieces of .NET Core, including RyuJIT.

Next Steps

Like we did in the past with .NET code that Microsoft open sourced, and like we did with Roslyn, we are going to be integrating this code into Mono and Xamarin's products.

Later this week, expect updated versions of the Mono project roadmap and a list of tasks that need to be completed to integrate the Microsoft .NET Framework code into Mono.

Longer term, we will make the Mono virtual machine support the new .NET Core deployment model as well as the new VM/class library interface

We are going to be moving the .NET Core discussions over to the .NET Foundation Forums.

With the Mono project, we have spent 14 years working on open source .NET. Having Microsoft release .NET and issue a patent covenant will ensure that we can all cooperate and build a more vibrant, richer, and larger .NET community.