Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is now Open Source MS-PL
The source for ASP.NET MVC has long been available up at http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet. The source has been "Available" so I usually call this "Source Opened" as opposed to "Open Source."
ASP.NET MVC has been "Free" as in "Gratis" since it started. That means, "Free like Beer." As ScottGu just blogged about moments ago, today, it's also "Libre" as in "Free like Speech." You can do what you want with the source.
Today, ASP.NET MVC is now Open Source and licensed under MS-PL. That means you can change it, redistribute your changes, even fork it if you want. MS-PL is an OSI-Approved Open Source License and you can read the legalese on their site.
"The Ms-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code."
As a reminder, MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) is another .NET Framework component that's MS-PL, as is the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) and IronRuby. The Ajax Control Toolkit and Silverlight Toolkit is also MS-PL.
These are all baby steps, but more and more folks at The Company are starting to "get it." We won't rest until we've changed the way we do business.
If you like, you can download and install ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from inside of the Web Platform Installer 2.0 directly.
Congrats to ScottGu and PhilHa and the team for making this happen. Now, go bask in the source as the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 download has been updated with a zip of the source. I hope Miguel is dancing today.
If you have any questions about the future, legal stuff, etc, I'll defer them to ScottGu (leave them in his comments).
(This is not an April Fools joke. It's for reals.)
Related Links
- Learn more about ASP.NET MVC with Videos, Tutorials, and Examples
- Free ASP.NET MVC eBook Tutorial
- Example App at http://www.codeplex.com/nerddinner
- Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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rams
That oughta shut up those fuddy duddies that say MS doesn't care about open source. This is a fantastic milestone.
Good work team.
Congrats!
Adam - Yes, Mono should be able to do whatever they like, as I understand it.
Cheers
I know ASP.NET MVC just been released, but I can't seem to wait for the next improvements.
Keep up the good work.
Nishanth
The key thinking that needs to change at Microsoft is not so much that Open Source is good, but that doing the right thing for customers and community is of equal or higher value than doing what's right for Microsoft. That is the only way any software company is viable long-term. Because they got this so backwards for a decade, they have drawn good competition from many different angles.
Thanks to folks like you for fighting the good fight.
Would you have a link somewhere that specifies which licenses MS-PL is compatible with, can I redistribute as GPL? Can I include MS-PL code in a BSD project? Etc ...
Cheers
Sam
Pages like http://referencesource.microsoft.com/netframework.aspx are as broken as the promises which were made to fix them (months ago) at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/refsourceserver/threads/.
The blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/rscc/ is apparently abandoned - though that might just be despair at blogs.msdn.com being on its knees the whole time - actually there's a general sense of abandonment about blogs.msdn.com.
If things like RSCC and blogs.msdn.com are really just personal side-projects, subject to the same loss-of-attention that most of us experience for things, then fine. But when they're promoted as significant steps for MS (RSCC was hugely puffed in this fashion), it's not very reassuring to your customers when they fall on the floor so soon after.
We all know what long-term neglect by MS looks like - we get to see it (sometimes, eventually, perhaps) every time we press F1.
It's not enough for you guys to be great at cool new stuff like MVC and reference source (and I love it, don't get me wrong), you have to look like you're in it for the long haul - how many releases is JQuery intellisense annotation going to last for, do we all think?
Now if you can only lift the remaining FUD, patent and litigation cloud over the mono opensource .NET stack, there would be very little reason left not to use .NET for most applications.
One question, where are the tests!?
Thank you for doing this. I definitely appreciate Microsoft's work here in .NET. It is just so much nicer than everything else out there. Now with MVC, I can put away my Django book and focus on my C#.
Alex Birch
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