In addition, it's absurd to suggest that Mono represents "competition" to the genuine .NET product. It would, maybe, if the source for any end-user applications targetted at .NET were available (and could be relinked under Mono)... but they're not. Take, for example, VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3: you can't use its real features (Virtual Center, VMotion, snapshot backups) unless you have a system running .NET. You *must* use .NET for that, because the executables are yours, but there's no binary that runs outside of Windows. You can't even run the VI3 client on anything that's not Windows. That's pretty much SOP for commercial software reliant upon .NET, so releasing the API (and implementation, which saves them support questions but costs them nothing) hurts MS in no way.

0x6772

Let's keep things in perspective here. All Microsoft are doing is making the source to the .NET libraries available to developers. Sun did this with Java from day one, a decade before anyone was even seriously suggesting an Open Source Java.

It's just a courtesy to developers. Sometimes if your code is doing something weird, it really helps to be able to step through the library source to see what's really going on under the hood.

As much as Microsoft deserves everything they get, it must really suck when even your most mundane decisions are microscopically analysed for the faintest signs of avarice or weakness.

carlfish