Microsoft isn’t a company you’d associate with open source. Indeed if you wound back the clock 10 years or so you’d find a company that was outright hostile to the idea, often going to great lengths to ensure open source projects that competed with their offerings would never see the light of day. The Microsoft of today is vastly different, contributing to dozens of open sourced projects and working hard with partner organisations to develop their presence in the ecosystem. For the most part however this has usually been done with an integration view towards their proprietary products which isn’t exactly in-line with the open source ethos. That may be set to change however as Microsoft will be fully open sourcing its .NET framework, the building blocks of all Microsoft applications.
For the uninitiated Microsoft .NET is a development framework that’s been around since the Windows XP days that exposed a consistent set of capabilities which applications could make use of. Essentially this meant that developing a .NET application meant you could guarantee it would work on any computer running that framework, something which wasn’t entirely a given before its inception. It’s since then grown substantially in capability, allowing developers to create some very capable programs using nothing more than the functionality built directly into Windows. Indeed it was so successful in accomplishing its aims that there was already a project going to make it work on non-Windows platforms, dubbed Mono, and it is with them that Microsoft is seeking to release a full open source implementation of the .NET framework.
Whilst this still falls in line with Microsoft’s open source strategy of “things to get people onto the Microsoft platform” it does open up a lot of opportunities for software to be freed from the Microsoft platform. The .NET framework underpins a lot of applications that run on Windows, some that only run on Windows, and an implementation of that framework on another platform could quickly elevate them to cross platform status. Sure, the work to translate them would still likely be non-trivial, however it’ll be a damn sight easier with a full implementation available, possibly enough to tempt some companies to make the investment.
One particularly exciting application of an open sourced .NET framework is games which, traditionally, have an extremely high opportunity cost when porting between platforms. Whilst everything about games development on Windows isn’t strictly .NET there are a lot of .NET based frameworks out there that will be readily portable to new platforms once the open sourcing is complete. I’m not expecting miracles, of course, but it does mean that the future of cross-platform releases is looking a whole bunch brighter than it was just a week ago.
This is probably one of Microsoft’s longest bets in a while as it’s going to be years before the .NET framework sees any kind of solid adoption among the non-Windows crowd. However this does drastically increase the potential of C# and .NET to become the cross platform framework of favour with developers, especially considering the large .NET developer community that already exists today. It’s going to be an area that many of us will be watching with keen interest as it’s yet another signal that Microsoft isn’t the company it used to be, a likely never will be again in the future.
