Portable.NET

Portable.NET
Stable release 0.8.0 / March 20, 2007
Written in C, C#
Operating system Cross-platform
Type .NET
License GPL
Website www.dotgnu.org

Part of the decommissioned[1] DotGNU project, Portable.NET is a free software and open source software initiative aiming to build a portable toolchain and runtime for Common Language Infrastructure applications.[2] The project focuses on compatibility with the ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 standards and support for .NET's base class libraries, XML, and Windows Forms. As of March 2007 the latest release of Portable.NET is 0.8.0. The project supports a number of different CPU architectures and operating systems.

It was originally started by Norbert Bollow and Rhys Weatherley, at that time director of Southern Storm Software, Pty Ltd. After Rhys Weatherley and many up-to-date developers quit development of Portable.NET, Klaus Treichel, Kirill Kononenko, Radek Polak, Aleksey Demakov continued development and design of Portable.NET Just-In-Time compiler and LibJIT Just-In-Time compilation library.

Portable.NET and Microsoft's patents

For more details on this topic, see Software patents and free software.

Portable.NET's implementation of those components of the .NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project. In particular, discussion has taken place about whether Microsoft could destroy the Portable.NET project through patent suits.

The base technologies submitted to the ECMA may be non-problematic. The concerns primarily relate to technologies developed by Microsoft on top of the .NET Framework, such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms (see Non-standardized namespaces), i.e. parts composing Portable.NET's Windows compatibility stack. These technologies are today not fully implemented in Portable.NET and not required for developing Portable.NET-applications.

Free Software Foundation's warnings

In a note posted on the Free Software Foundation's news website in June 2009, Richard Stallman warned that he believes "Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents" and recommended that developers avoid taking what he described as the "gratuitous risk" associated with "depend[ing] on the free C# implementations", including Portable.NET.[3]

See also

Notes

  1. "http://www.dotgnu.org/". As of December 2012, the DotGNU project has been decommissioned, until and unless a substantial new volunteer effort arises. The exception is the libjit component, which is now a separate libjit package.
  2. Troelsen, Andrew (2010), Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4.0 Platform (5th ed.), Apress, ISBN 1-4302-2549-1, p. 39
  3. Stallman, Richard (June 26, 2009). "Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved July 2, 2009. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents.... We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.

External links