fallenrogue.com

I’ve been a critic of Microsoft. I develop on their platform and use their products every day. Lately I thought that their working with open source for their MVC product line, while a step in the right direction was still largely serving platitudes to the vocal minority alpha geeks. It wasn’t really open, it wasn’t really community owned. That’s not saying anything about the product itself, which is quite good, it just wasn’t what I was hoping for. I was hoping for a vendor fork of Castle. Something that didn’t re-invent the wheel that the community had spent time creating but rather built upon their great work and rewarded it with support and endorsement.

So, you’ll imagine my utter shock and surprise when it was announced that the very popular and hugely successful javascript library jquery will be packaged and shipped with full Visual Studio support (intellisense, etc) in the next version. But wait! It doesn’t stop there! They are shipping the library as is (no vendor fork) and under the existing MIT license.

I don’t think I can stress just how big this is for Open Source and Microsoft. Getting OSS adoption in some enterprises with ELAs with Microsoft can be a real challenge. Seeing MS proactively embrace this project under its license goes a long way to solidifying credibility. It also is a huge vote of confidence to the community for their hard work. The reward being, Enterprise recognition while retaining community ownership. Microsoft, I have been hard on you with good reason but today I applaud you and this decision.