This post is pretty irrelevant considering the amount of excitement this has generated in the blogosphere already, but for those of you who've been hiding under a rock:
I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). The 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. [Scott Guthrie]
For those of us who like to dabble in the open source world, this is major news. Especially for those of us who've adopted Linux and Mono as our cloud server operating system of choice.
And no, as hard as it is to believe, it's not an April Fool's joke. I think maybe Microsoft has hired just one too many open source software developers :)
Miguel de Icaza is already talking about integrating the code into Mono. This has some obviously major benefits: no more reverse engineering and thus far less compatibility problems. It looks like the dream of running .NET on free operating systems is beginning to solidify nicely!
To find out more about how this happened, go read it from the source:
ScottGu
Rob Conery
Phil Haack
Scott Hanselman
If you're serious about .NET I would suggest subscribing to all of the above blogs if you haven't done so already.