1.
Microsoft
–
Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup, as of 2016, it was the worlds largest software maker by revenue, and one of the worlds most valuable companies. Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4,1975, to develop and it rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The companys 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion, in June 2012, Microsoft entered the personal computer production market for the first time, with the launch of the Microsoft Surface, a line of tablet computers. The word Microsoft is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion for computer programming, sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which offered a computer that tracked and analyzed automobile traffic data. Allen went on to pursue a degree in science at Washington State University. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systemss Altair 8800 microcomputer, Allen suggested that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device, after a call from Gates claiming to have a working interpreter, MITS requested a demonstration. Since they didnt actually have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter and they officially established Microsoft on April 4,1975, with Gates as the CEO. Allen came up with the name of Micro-Soft, as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In August 1977 the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office, the company moved to a new home in Bellevue, Washington in January 1979. Microsoft entered the OS business in 1980 with its own version of Unix, however, it was MS-DOS that solidified the companys dominance. For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, branding it as MS-DOS, following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981, Microsoft retained ownership of MS-DOS. Since IBM copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, other companies had to engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles. Due to various factors, such as MS-DOSs available software selection, the company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as with a publishing division named Microsoft Press. Paul Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after developing Hodgkins disease, while jointly developing a new OS with IBM in 1984, OS/2, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows, a graphical extension for MS-DOS, on November 20,1985. Once Microsoft informed IBM of NT, the OS/2 partnership deteriorated, in 1990, Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office
2.
International Organization for Standardization
–
The International Organization for Standardization is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on 23 February 1947, the organization promotes worldwide proprietary and it is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and as of March 2017 works in 162 countries. It was one of the first organizations granted general consultative status with the United Nations Economic, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, is an independent, non-governmental organization, the members of which are the standards organizations of the 162 member countries. It is the worlds largest developer of international standards and facilitates world trade by providing common standards between nations. Nearly twenty thousand standards have been set covering everything from manufactured products and technology to food safety, use of the standards aids in the creation of products and services that are safe, reliable and of good quality. The standards help businesses increase productivity while minimizing errors and waste, by enabling products from different markets to be directly compared, they facilitate companies in entering new markets and assist in the development of global trade on a fair basis. The standards also serve to safeguard consumers and the end-users of products and services, the three official languages of the ISO are English, French, and Russian. The name of the organization in French is Organisation internationale de normalisation, according to the ISO, as its name in different languages would have different abbreviations, the organization adopted ISO as its abbreviated name in reference to the Greek word isos. However, during the meetings of the new organization, this Greek word was not invoked. Both the name ISO and the logo are registered trademarks, the organization today known as ISO began in 1926 as the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations. ISO is an organization whose members are recognized authorities on standards. Members meet annually at a General Assembly to discuss ISOs strategic objectives, the organization is coordinated by a Central Secretariat based in Geneva. A Council with a membership of 20 member bodies provides guidance and governance. The Technical Management Board is responsible for over 250 technical committees, ISO has formed joint committees with the International Electrotechnical Commission to develop standards and terminology in the areas of electrical and electronic related technologies. Information technology ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 was created in 1987 to evelop, maintain, ISO has three membership categories, Member bodies are national bodies considered the most representative standards body in each country. These are the members of ISO that have voting rights. Correspondent members are countries that do not have their own standards organization and these members are informed about ISOs work, but do not participate in standards promulgation. Subscriber members are countries with small economies and they pay reduced membership fees, but can follow the development of standards
3.
Ecma International
–
ECMA is a standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association changed its name to reflect the global reach. As a consequence, the name is no longer considered an acronym, the organization was founded in 1961 to standardize computer systems in Europe. Ecma publications, including standards, can be copied by all interested parties without copyright restrictions. The development of standards and technical reports is done in co-operation with the national, European. Unlike national standardization bodies, Ecma is a membership-based organization and it takes pride in the resulting business-like approach to standards, claimed to lead to better standards in less time, thanks to a less bureaucratic process focused on achieving results by consensus. Ecma has actively contributed to worldwide standardization in information technology and telecommunications, more than 400 Ecma Standards and 100 Technical Reports have been published, more than 2/3 of which have also been adopted as international standards and/or technical reports. The memberlist of Ecma International is available on its website, thus, Ecma is not responsible for the standardization of Java. Ecma is involved in the standardization of the Ecma Office Open XML format based on the XML office document formats by Microsoft, the Ecma Office Open XML maintenance process is performed by technical committee 45
4.
.NET Framework
–
. NET Framework is a software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a class library named Framework Class Library and provides language interoperability across several programming languages. FCL and CLR together constitute. NET Framework, FCL provides user interface, data access, database connectivity, cryptography, web application development, numeric algorithms, and network communications. Programmers produce software by combining their source code with. NET Framework, the framework is intended to be used by most new applications created for the Windows platform. Silverlight was available as a web browser plugin, Microsoft began developing. NET Framework in the late 1990s, originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services. By late 2000, the first beta versions of. NET1.0 were released, in August 2000, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel worked to standardize Common Language Infrastructure and C#. By December 2001, both were ratified Ecma International standards, International Organisation for Standardisation followed in April 2003. The current version of ISO standards are ISO-IEC23271,2012, 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. The firms agreed to meet these terms, and to make the patents available royalty-free, however, this did not apply for the part of. NET Framework not covered by ECMA-ISO standards, which included Windows Forms, ADO. NET, and ASP. NET. Patents that Microsoft holds in these areas may have deterred non-Microsoft implementations of the full framework, on 3 October 2007, Microsoft announced that the source code for. NET Framework 3.5 libraries was to become available under the Microsoft Reference Source License. The source code became available online on 16 January 2008 and included BCL, ASP. NET, ADO. NET, Windows Forms, WPF. Scott Guthrie of Microsoft promised that LINQ, WCF, and WF libraries were being added, in November 2014, Microsoft also produced an update to its patent grants, which further extends the scope beyond its prior pledges. The new grant does maintain the restriction that any implementation must maintain compliance with the mandatory parts of the CLI specification. On 31 March 2016, Microsoft announced at Microsoft Build that they will completely relicense Mono under an MIT License even in scenarios where formerly a commercial license was needed and it was announced that the Mono Project was contributed to the. NET Foundation. These developments followed the acquisition of Xamarin, which began in February 2016 and was finished on 18 March 2016. Microsofts press release highlights that the cross-platform commitment now allows for a fully open-source, however, Microsoft does not plan to release the source for WPF or Windows Forms. By implementing the core aspects of. NET Framework within the scope of CLI, microsofts implementation of CLI is Common Language Runtime. It serves as the engine of. NET Framework
5.
Mono (software)
–
The logo of Mono is a stylized monkeys face, mono being Spanish for monkey. The stated purpose of Mono is not only to be able to run Microsoft. NET applications cross-platform, but also to bring better development tools to Linux developers. Mono can be run on many systems including Android, most Linux distributions, BSD, macOS, Windows, Solaris, and even some game consoles such as PlayStation 3, Wii. The Mono project has been controversial within the community, as it implements portions of. NET Framework that may be covered by Microsoft patents. Following Microsofts open-sourcing of several core. NET technologies since 2014 and its acquisition of Xamarin in the beginning of 2016, Miguel de Icaza of Ximian believed that. NET had the potential to increase programmer productivity and began investigating whether a Linux version was feasible. Recognizing that their team could not expect to build and support a full product, they launched the Mono open-source project. After three years development, Mono 1.0 was released on June 30,2004, Mono evolved from its initial focus of a developer platform for Linux desktop applications to supporting a wide range of architectures and operating systems - including embedded systems. After Novell was acquired by Attachmate in April 2011, Attachmate announced hundreds of layoffs for the Novell workforce, on May 16, Miguel de Icaza announced in his blog that Mono would continue to be supported by Xamarin, a company he founded after being laid off from Novell. The original Mono team had moved to the new company. Xamarin planned to keep working on Mono and had planned to rewrite the commercial. NET stacks for iOS and Android from scratch, because Novell still owned MonoTouch and Mono for Android at the time. This version provides the core API of the. NET Framework and support for Visual Basic. NET and C# versions 2.0,3.0, LINQ to Objects, XML, and SQL are part of the distribution. C#6.0 is now the default mode of operation for the C# compiler, Windows Forms 2.0 is also supported, but not actively developed, and as such its support on Mono is incomplete. Version 4.0 is the first version that incorporates Microsoft original source code that was released by Microsoft as part of the. NET Core project. Monos aim is to full support for the features in. NET4.5 except Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation. Some missing parts of the. NET Framework are under development in an experimental Mono subproject called Olive, the Mono project has also created a Visual Basic. NET compiler and a runtime designed for running VB. NET applications. It is currently being developed by Rolf Bjarne Kvinge, an open-source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, called Moonlight, has been included since Mono 1.9. Moonlight 1.0, which supports the Silverlight 1.0 APIs, was released January 20,2009, Moonlight 2.0 supports Silverlight 2.0 and some features of Silverlight 3.0. A preview release of Moonlight 3.0 was announced in February 2010, the Moonlight project was abandoned on May 29,2012
6.
DotGNU
–
DotGNU is a decommissioned part of the GNU Project that aims to provide a free software replacement for Microsofts. NET Framework by Free Software Foundation. Other goals of the project are better support for non-Windows platforms, the main goal of the DotGNU project code base was to provide a class library that is 100% Common Language Specification compliant. Portable. NET claims to support various instruction set architectures including x86, PPC, ARM, DotGNU Execution Environment is a web service server. It implements an intermediate based on three-address code, in which variables are kept in static single assignment form. LibJIT has also some use in other open source projects, including ILDJIT. The Portable. NET class library seeks to provide facilities for application development and these are primarily written in C#, but because of the Common Language Specification they can be used by any. NET language. Like. NET, the library is structured into Namespaces and Assemblies. It has additional top-level namespaces including Accessibility and DotGNU, in a typical operation, the Portable. NET compiler generates a Common Language Specification image, as specified in chapter 6 of ECMA-335, and the Portable. NET runtime takes this image and runs it. DotGNU points out that it is Free Software, and it sets out to ensure all aspects of DotGNU minimize dependence on proprietary components. DotGNU was one of the High Priority Free Software Projects from July 31,2007 till October 2,2008. DotGNU’s implementation of 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 DotGNU project through patent suits, the base technologies submitted to the ECMA may be non-problematic. These technologies are not fully implemented in DotGNU and are not required for developing DotGNU-applications
