Comment by JohnBooty

11 years ago

Yeah, I think that's totally fair to say.

I wouldn't place bets on any strategy that relied on Microsoft not closing the doors again at some point in the future, on future versions of their development stack.

Like you said, though, this is better than not having happened.

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JohnBooty

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lugg  11 years ago

I don't see why they would. This has been an obvious move for a long time, keeping it closed never really made any sense to me. They gained nothing from .Net being closed except hate and utter avoidance from people like me (vocal early adopters.)

MS doesn't really make money off C# or .Net directly, they make money off the windows licenses you need to run the resulting code.

Open C#/.Net = stronger, longer lasting community / free improvements = more users = more licenses.

It also has other side effects like fostering [more] open source frameworks/plugins for their platform, which again, strengthens their position.

  • jussij  11 years ago

    > MS doesn't really make money off C# or .Net directly, they make money off the windows licenses you need to run the resulting code.

    On this page: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/microsoft-updates-visual-st...

    There is this quote:

    Microsoft also today announced that Visual Studio 2013 has sold over 3.7 million copies since its release less than five months ago. That makes it the fastest-selling release of Visual Studio to date.

    Based on those numbers and the fact that Visual Studio prices range from about $1,000.00 for VS Professional up to $13,000.00 for VS Ultimate, I'd say they make quite a bit of money of C#, .Net (and of course C++ as well).

    • V-2  11 years ago

      Well, that's not making money off C# and .NET directly - it's IDE sales. Btw, I worked on VS Express (in a commercial environment) for a long time.

    • crag  11 years ago

      Those sales also include MSDN You can buy VS 2013 right now, without MSDN for around $400.00. Still pricey IMHO. But no where near the 1k price-point you referenced.

    • lugg  11 years ago

      VS has been around a lot longer than C# and although anecdotal I would hazard a guess to say the majority of those sales were at massive discount to schools and universities not to mention there is no way they would get 13k a pop in other countries.

      Like I said they dont make money off the language or the framework directly it being open source will certainly not hinder or hurt their vs sales. It will most likely increase them.

  • lgieron  11 years ago

    Releasing .NET sources could help Mono development and ultimately lead to .NET world not being locked to Windows (at least on servers, you'd still want Windows for Visual Studio when doing development)