I think this is one of the biggest steps Microsoft ever made in this direction. They will be releasing the source code for the .NET Framework Library, especially for adding support in debugging.
The announcement was made today, but the release will be later this year, along with .NET 3.5 and VS2008.
Another cool thing is that WPF will also be open, so finally developers can “watch and learn” how it was built. They say the release will be available also as a single independent install and will contain the base class libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, XML and WPF. Linq, WCF and Linq will be released later.
The licensing mode is Microsoft Reference License, so It’s not the Open Source you thought it was when you first hear about it.
The word is out, Digg users make nasty comments (not to mention Slashdotters), everybody’s talking about it, and even Scott Hanselman delayed his show for one week to sync with the announcement. So I say it worked.
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This is f… huge! This will diminish the differences towards Java and more.
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