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by tamlin 500 days ago
Microsoft had a research version of the CLR called Rotor (2002) that predated Mono (2004). Rotor built for Windows, FreeBSD, and macOs, albeit with a not-very-open license.

When Mono came along, the internal position at Microsoft was surprisingly positive. There was a dev slide deck that went into Mono in some depth. And a telling slide that said it wasn't a threat because the performance wasn't competitive at the time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Languag...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)
1 comments
caspper69 500 days ago
Rotor was BSD licensed, so I suppose if that’s your definition of a not very open license…
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tamlin 499 days ago
Rotor had it's own license:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_...

I have various snapshots of the Rotor 1 and 2 sources around and they have the SSCLI license. There is a file that contains BSD licensed code (pal\rotor_pal.h).

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caspper69 499 days ago
Thank you for the follow up. You know after I posted that my thought was am I mistaking their BSD release for a BSD license, and of course I was. The memory isn’t what it used to be.
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dcrazy 500 days ago
Was it originally BSD-licensed, or did it start out as the MS Public Source License or whatever it was called?

We could go back and check on Codeplex… oh wait.

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caspper69 499 days ago
As a sibling poster updated it was some bastardized shared source license that never caught on.

Thank goodness MS got over their allergy to open source licenses, as they seem to prefer MIT nowadays for their releases.

My apologies for misremembering the details and being snarky. Humble pie eaten and enjoyed. :)

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tamlin 497 days ago
No worries, and no humble pie required. Peace, good happiness.
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