JQuery and Microsoft, some thoughts.
I noted this last night from Scott Hanslemans twitter messages and Scott Gu's blog post, it makes a lot of sense that a popular javascript lib have VS support and be included in the MVC framework. What caught my attention the most however was these parts from Scott Gu's announcement.
I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license.
The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects.
We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS.
The implications for this are pretty big, while Microsoft don't have retail product that competes with JQuery they still sending patches to an OSS project, shipping an OSS project and supporting an OSS project. If the license fits then Microsoft could look at integrating with other OSS projects, it will be interesting to watch.