On 11/1/07, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> Surely you would not expect Microsoft to contribute to gcc or Mono rather than
> starting their own projects?

Actually, Microsoft does not have a total aversion to helping out when
the topic is .NET. Case in point would be the Silverlight/Moonlight
.NET layer for browser based applications.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html

<snip>
* Microsoft will give Novell access to the test suites for Silverlight
to ensure that we have a compatible specification. The same test suite
that Microsoft uses for Silverlight.

* Microsoft will give us access to the Silverlight specifications:
details that might be necessary to implement 1.0, beyond what is
currently published on the web; and specifications on the 1.1 version
of Silverlight as it is updated.

* Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to
users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary
codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web
browser (sorry, those are the rules for the Media codecs[1]).
</snip>

Personally, I'm using F# because it gives me a great platform for
creating applications, not a bare-minimum for creating programs (not a
topic I'm particularly interested in having a flame-war over. My
choices are my own, others will have to deal with theirs).

Lars Nilsson