open source

[rwin]

is VB.net or other .net language allowed to be used as open source and license it to GPL ?

[jmcilhinney]

Of course. As the name suggests, with open source applications the source is open to the public. It has nothing to do with the language that source was written in. Anyway, VB.NET itself is free. You can download the SDK from Microsoft and create any sort of applciation you want, commercial or open source, without paying a cent. It's the IDE you are paying the money for, and you can even get one of them for nothing for a while now too.

[rwin]

even if vb is from microsoft , which is private and whose code are proprietary
according to the GPL any proprietary is prohibited

[jmcilhinney]

Hmmm... perhaps I was a little hasty. I certainly don't knwo all the details of the GPL so perhaps I should think before posting. You may well be onto something there, at least where the .NET Framework is concerned. There is the Mono project, which aims to replicate the functionality of the .NET Framework and is open source itself. Presumably if you wanted to support the open source movement you would build against that. You can use C# but I'm not sure if there is a VB.NET compiler available or not.

[Kasracer]

The GPL only says the following two things about propriary code:

Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

Which basically says if you get a patent on an application which was created under the GPL, then the patent must state that it can be used freely by anyone.

The other one...

This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License.

Which basically means you cannot write something that incorporates into another applicaiton that is not GPLed.

I don't see why you can't license any .Net code under the GPL. I did a quick google search and found many software developers distributing C# applicaitons under the GPL.

You can use C# but I'm not sure if there is a VB.NET compiler available or not.

There is a VB compiler available for mono.

[rwin]

i seen a c# too but for vb.net , i am not sure about that language as open source isn't vb.net too from .net family as c# is, but why they dont want to use it

[Kasracer]

i seen a c# too but for vb.net , i am not sure about that language as open source isn't vb.net too from .net family as c# is, but why they dont want to use it

Same situation applies. Since most people using VB.Net are more into RAD and it's usually for a company, there may not be as many projects as C#.

[jmcilhinney]

It occurred to me the other day that #ZipLib is open source. It is a compression library written in C# and released under the GPL. SharpDevelop is an open source IDE for C# and VB.NET also written in C# by the same people.