Microsoft's Ajax.Net License

Microsoft recently announced the release of ASP.NET AJAX, their extension to ASP.NET to spice it up with Ajax goodness (Scott Guthrie's blog is always the best source for the details).

Microsoft must be commended for picking the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) for all the of their client-side Javascript libraries and the AJAX Control Toolkit.

The Ms-PL is for all intents and purposes an open source license.

This is a diagram from the introduction to ASP.NET AJAX:

The left-hand side is what has been released under the Ms-PL. For the whole stack to work on Mono, we will have to do some work on the server-side assemblies that provide the support (the System.Web.Extensions assembly). It is likely a lot of work, but considerably less than the whole stack.

The AJAX Control Toolkit comes with 30 controls for common tasks, with a nice sampler of the controls. The Control Toolkit is actually being developed in the open, and Microsoft is integrating external contributions.

Nikhil has a retrospective on how the project came to be. A good chunk of information for those of us interested in the archaeology of software.

A big thanks to everyone at Microsoft involved in picking the Ms-PL license for these technologies.