This weekend the news came out that Microsoft was going to bundle and support John Resig's jQuery as part of Visual Studio and ASP.NET. From Scott's blog:
I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license.
Beyond the obvious benefits to developers, what interests me is that Microsoft is now bundling an open source component into their commercial offerings.
This is a first time for Microsoft.
With IronPython they continued development of an open source project in house. With IronRuby, they were open to external contributions to the libraries of IronRuby. In both cases they were not taking external code or contributions directly into their core products.
Hopefully they will start using more open source code in their products. Maybe one day they will bundle Mono's Cecil or Mono's embeddable C# compiler.
Posted on 01 Oct 2008