I have no idea what prompted this, but after a bazillion years, Microsoft has released the code to .NET and declared it open source.
http://www.programmableweb.com/news/microsoft-open-sources-.net-stack/2014/11/13
In a landmark move, Microsoft has open sourced the server-side .NET stack which will be made available to be run on Linux and Mac operating systems.
The open sourced components consist of a full server-side .NET stack, which includes ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, and .NET Framework and Libraries. In cooperation with the .NET foundation, an organization dedicated to overseeing open source .NET technologies, Microsoft will be inviting developers to contribute to the .NET stack going forward. To that end, it has established a Github account where the .NET code is available to anyone for download.
This means you, yes you, can download it and have your way with it.
As mentioned, there is a chance we can see the real deal running on Linux (they kind of have a brokenish (last time I used it a few years back) emulated version of it at the moment).
There are a ton of applications that require it and it might help someone sometime.
I can only hope that good things will come from this, but its such a huge software project that its hard to figure what they thought might gain by opening it up and how the bald basement hacker is going to leverage this openness.
