Microsoft 'Shares' .NET Framework

Microsoft today announced a partnership with Corel to develop its C# and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) development tools for the FreeBSD operating system. Versions of these tools will be made available to academic institutions and researchers under the "shared source" initiative. Redmond has been promoting shared source in place of the open source GPL licensing agreement which it has described as being "viral in nature." Corel is experienced in developing products for flavors of UNIX, having once distributed its own version of Linux.

Often beleaguered by the open source community, Microsoft spokesperson Craig Mundie underscored the company's code sharing strategy, stating "First, we took the core Microsoft .NET technologies to the W3C and ECMA standards bodies for standardization. Now, with Corel, we're creating an implementation under our shared source philosophy." A beta version of the tools is expected to be released in early 2002 with a final version coming later that year.

Given similarities between FreeBSD and Linux, porting the .NET framework to the open source rival would not come as much of a challenge. However, Microsoft has denied reports that it intends to do so.

More information on .NET is available at msdn.microsoft.com/net. For more information on Microsoft's shared source philosophy, visit microsoft.com/sharedsource.