Standardization and licensing

In August 2000, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel worked to standardize CLI and C#. By
December 2001, both were ratified ECMA standards.
[16][17]
ISO followed in April 2003. The
current version of ISO standards are ISO/IEC 23271:2012 and ISO/IEC 23270:2006.
[18][19]

While Microsoft and their partners hold patents for 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 .NET Framework which is not
covered by 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.
[20]

On 3 October 2007, Microsoft announced that much of the source code for .NET Framework
Framework 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.
[1]
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 closed-source Microsoft Reference License means this source
code is made available for debugging purpose only, primarily to support integrated debugging of
FCL in Visual Studio.