Microsoft flung open the doors to .NET and Visual Studio today, saying it would open-source the entire .NET server core stack for developers and introduced a new, free version of Visual Studio.
The open source .NET will expanded to run on both Linux and Mac OS X. While several components of the Core .NET framework were released today, the remainder of .NET Core Runtime and .NET Core Framework will be released over the next several months, according to S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft.
.NET is now open source. Sometimes it feels like Satya is in one of those 80's teen movies when the parents go out of town. And it's great.
— Aaron Levie (@levie) November 12, 2014
The projects will be released under the MIT open source license, he said. These moves follow Microsoft’s decision back in April to make certain parts of .NET open source.
See also: With The .NET Foundation, Microsoft Finally Bets Big On Open Source
The new Visual Studio Community 2013 is free for non-enterprise developers and also gives access to a free version of Microsoft Azure, which will grant cloud hosting for 10 websites and 10 mobile services. Larger customers will still need to get a paid version of Visual Studio.
“This is a momentous occasion, and one that I have advocated for many years,” Miguel de Icaza, a well-known open-source programmer, wrote in a blog post. De Icaza has been at the heart of efforts to make the .NET development platform usable on Linux and Unix systems since 2001, starting Mono and then Xamarin.
Photo of Microsoft VP S. Somasegar by ImagineCup
