Microsoft has said it will allow academic researchers to view the
nuts and bolts of some of the .net source code the company will use
in its wide-ranging initiative to supply applications and services
over the Internet.
More than one million lines of source code for .net will be made
available under Microsoft's previously announced "Shared Source"
licensing program to academic researchers in university
computer-science departments. Shared source is Microsoft's response
to the open-source software movement and the growing popularity of
the Linux operating system. Open-source software such as Linux
typically is developed by programmers collaborating and freely
sharing code updates.
Under Microsoft's shared source licence, developers have been able
to view source code, but not modify it as they can with Linux. The
shared-source implementation for .net and Microsoft's Common
Language Infrastructure for academics will run on the Windows XP
operating system and the open-source FreeBSD derivative of the Unix
operating system.
Windows source code is also available to academics under shared
source licensing, allowing non-commercial modification for academic
and research purposes.
Microsoft's source-code announcement came as Sun Microsystems
handed developers more pieces of its Java programming technology
designed for building and deploying Web services, at the JavaOne
Developer Conference in San Francisco. Sun said developers will be
able to submit some changes for Java under open-source licences and
receive financial support from the company for their projects.
Microsoft has made a number of moves recently that have been seen
as a reaction to both Sun's Java efforts and growing momentum for
open-source projects. For example, Microsoft has submitted some of
the underpinnings of its .net initiative to a European standards
body. Those technologies, which include the C# programming language
and a component of its .net Framework called CLI (Common Language
Infrastructure), were approved as standards by the European
Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) in December 2001.
Microsoft has also funded an effort by software maker Corel to
implement the ECMA standards and create the version of the .net
Framework for FreeBSD and testing. That implementation is what
Microsoft will hand out under its latest academic deal.
"It's useful to validate specifications as they go through
standardisation," said John Montgomery, a Microsoft product
manager, on why the company first created the FreeBSD version of
the .net Framework.
C#, a component-oriented programming language Microsoft developed,
has been compared to Java in that, among other things, it is
intended to allow developers to write code and reuse pieces of it
when building various applications. CLI is the underlying
technology for enabling developers to write .net applications in
more than 20 programming languages.
Microsoft's implementation of those technologies is called the .net
Framework. The company intends to use .net Framework as the common
platform for Web services and software that link business processes
together over the Internet with XML (Extensible Markup
Language).
Microsoft's new move to open up its .net technology to academia
will allow the company to gain vital feedback from engineers who
are able to study the code for purposes other than making
commercial technology. It is a move that is intended to expose
students and researchers to Windows technology in addition to the
Unix and Java programming that are also prevalent in the academic
community, Montgomery said. Microsoft has been giving academics
greater access to its code in the past few months, recently
allowing its academic licensees to publish some Windows code in
textbooks.
Also last month, Microsoft permitted about 150 systems integrators
with partnership agreements to have source-code access under the
shared-source initiative, ostensibly to aid partners' security
analysis, troubleshooting, customisation and privacy verification
tasks.
In addition to the work done by Corel, various open-source efforts
are under way to develop alternative versions of the .net Framework
based on the code Microsoft has submitted to ECMA. The Mono
Project, lead by Miguel de Icaza, chief technology officer of
Ximian, has been using the ECMA standards to develop a version of
.net for Linux, Unix and the Mac OS X operating systems.
"Without Microsoft's submissions it's not possible to implement the
technology," for other platforms, de Icaza said Tuesday.