Still getting my head around this early morning (in Europe timezone) announcement on ScottGu’s blog: ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source.

Some of you might remember that almost 3 years ago the announced that ASP.NET MVC v1 was being released under the MS-PL license, thus making it opensource. That turned out to be just a source snapshot of each public release, and were not accepting contributions, so, a “partial” commitment to open source.

This time is different: the source code is available from the “live” repository the ASP.NET team is working on, and they are going to accept pull requests (if of course the quality of the submission is good and it adheres to the roadmap for the release). And it’s not just ASP.NET MVC, but also the WebAPI, the Razor view engine, and ASP.NET Web Pages.

This means that one can build the frontend part of a web site/web application with Open Source libraries from Microsoft or officially supported by Microsoft (like jQuery, jQuery UI, Knockout.js, JSON.net, upshot). To make it complete the system.web dll would have to be opensourced as well, but that would mean the whole .NET framework should be opensourced.

Now some links:

Now go take your git client, join the 29 people that already forked the asp.net web stack, and submit your first pull request.