After some steps to embrace the OpenSource model, specially thanks to IronRuby and IronPython projects, the day has come.
Microsoft is shipping OpenSource tools as part of one of their products: jQuery will be part in ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio, with Intellisense support!
This is great news not because of jQuery itself (nevertheless, my congratulations to John Resig’s team), but because Microsoft is selling a product together with OpenSource code. This has been battled with a lot of effort by the IronPython and Ruby teams. For instance, IronPython is OpenSource, but cannot accept contributions from the community (in source code, bug reports are welcome). And until today, I thought they were doing the same approach with the JS toolkit for ASP.NET.
There’s this project Gimme ECMAScript (or Javascript if you prefer) library designed to make working with “everyone’s favorite scripting language” fun again!_ It is OpenSource, but since it was made by Microsoft:
Due to some licensing restrictions, code contributions from the community will not be accepted, however the Gimme source code is completely free and open to all who wish to view it and learn from it.
I’m glad Scottgu decided not to go with Gimme but with jQuery. (nothing against Gimme, but the community around jQuery is so much wider) This is the real step that tell us that Microsoft is really changing!