ASP.NET MVC open sourced by Microsoft

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In what at first appeared like it might be an April Fools joke, Microsoft announced that they have open sourced their ASP.NET MVC api. This was great news for the open source Mono project on multiple fronts.

First, as you can see from their roadmap, they were planning to implement this feature themselves in their 2.6 release targeted for September 2009. So this frees up resources on the project to work on other features instead.

Second and perhaps more importantly, the Mono project has had a somewhat uncertain relationship with regard to Microsoft’s .NET APIs. That is because while Microsoft has publicly stated that the the core of the .NET framework that they submitted to ECMA can be used royalty free, they have not done so with the rest of their .NET APIs that have been implemented by the Mono project such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms. And Microsoft has generally avoided providing an official stance on Mono (e.g. see the Moonlight FAQ). The result is a degree of ambiguity that is covered by the Mono licensing FAQ.

However, this open source release of the ASP.NET MVC framework means that at least this API can now be used on the Mono platform without those concerns. Which means that ASP.NET MVC applications are no longer restricted to running on Microsoft platforms (e.g. see this example using MonoDevelop to create an ASP.NET MVC application).

Does this mean that future Microsoft .NET APIs might also be open sourced? They certainly have a long way to go before they reach the level of commitment that Sun has shown on the OpenJDK project. And there are still legitimate reasons to remain skeptical. But this does give hope that the frost may be thawing. And if the licensing shadow can be lifted from the Mono project, it truly puts .NET on an even hardware and operating system agnostic playing field with the Java platform, which would be a great development for the industry as a whole.

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