Standardization and Licensing
In August 2000, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel worked to standardize CLI and the C# programming language. By December 2001, both were ratified ECMA standards (ECMA 335 and ECMA 334). ISO followed in April 2003 - the current version of the ISO standards are ISO/IEC 23271:2012 and ISO/IEC 23270:2006.
While Microsoft and their partners hold patents for the CLI and C#, ECMA and ISO require that all patents essential to implementation be made available under "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms". In addition to meeting these terms, the companies have agreed to make the patents available royalty-free.
However, this does not apply for the part of the .NET Framework which is not covered by the ECMA/ISO standard, which includes Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET. Patents that Microsoft holds in these areas may deter non-Microsoft implementations of the full framework.
On 3 October 2007, Microsoft announced that much of the source code for the .NET Framework Base Class Library (including ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows Presentation Foundation) was to have been made available with the final release of Visual Studio 2008 towards the end of 2007 under the shared source Microsoft Reference License. The source code for other libraries including Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and Language Integrated Query (LINQ) were to be added in future releases. Being released under the non-open source Microsoft Reference License means this source code is made available for debugging purpose only, primarily to support integrated debugging of the BCL in Visual Studio.
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