It"s fair to say that the Microsoft of today little resembles that from ten years ago. In fact, the whole software ecosystem and development model at Microsoft is changing rapidly, opening up and moving towards a more collaborative, community-embracing model.
Announced by Scott Guthrie, the VP of the Microsoft Developer Division, and detailed further by Scott Hanselman, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft"s Web Platform, Microsoft has started publishing more technologies as fully open-source projects. In his recent blog post, Guthrie detailed how the popular ASP.NET MVC framework, and associated ASP.NET WebAPI and WebPages frameworks are now open-source. He further cemented this by announcing that these projects are no longer licensed using the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), but are now provided under the Apache License 2.0. These new projects are available online at their new home at CodePlex.
What does this mean at Microsoft? Are we seeing a major shift in future development for a wider selection of Microsoft technologies?
With last years move to host the Azure development tools on Github, CodePlex"s own recent announcement of Git support, and support for Node.js on Windows Azure, developers are presented with a raft of opportunities for using the Microsoft platform, increasing both competition and innovation among developers.