Microsoft releases ASP.NET MVC under the MS-PL License

Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC is an extension built on the core of ASP.NET that brings some of the popular practices and ease of development that were popularized by Ruby on Rails and Django to the .NET developers.

Scott Guthrie ---the inventor of ASP.NET--- just announced that Microsoft is open sourcing the ASP.NET MVC stack under the MS-PL license:

I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code. You can read the text of the MS-PL at: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

These are incredibly good news. Worth dancing for!

I know that a lot of developers inside Microsoft worked to get this important piece of code released under the MS-PL to ensure that the users of ASP.NET could benefit from the code being open source. I know that at least Phil Haack, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Dimitry Robsman, Rob Conery and Brian Goldfarb pushed for this.

I am psyched, not only because ASP.NET MVC is usable in Mono and the code is licensed under open source terms, but also because I strongly believe that the same innovation, rapid adoption and experimentation that has happened with the new wave of web stacks will come to ASP.NET MVC across all platforms.

The source code is available for download and we are hoping to integrate this into Mono shortly. Scott Hanselman has a nice blog entry on how ASP.NET MVC went from price-free to open-source free.

In Scott's PDF tutorial he discussed how to build applications with ASP.NET MVC using Visual Studio and how the Rails practices of not repeating yourself and convention over configuration are used by ASP.NET MVC.

We have developed a MonoDevelop add-in that provides a set of templates, dialog boxes and the tooling necessary to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC on Linux and MacOS X as well. Hopefully the experience will be very similar to Visual Studio.

It was only two weeks ago that we were sipping virgin pina coladas at Mix09: