Microsoft and jQuery

About this time last year, I wrote a post questioning if Microsoft should bundle Open Source software with any of its products. They've shipped a number of Open Source projects (Wix, Iron Ruby, etc) but haven't taken a dependency on one.

Until now.

ScottGu just announced they're going to be shipping jQuery as an officially supported part of asp.net.

Kind of a surprising move - but a very good one.

They haven't really answered the questions from my post. What happens when jQuery goes out of favour? MS is going to have to support it in perpetuity. And, yes, they're actually supporting an Open Source project. If there are any bugs, they can't issue fixes for it - all patches they submit will go through exactly the same review process as a patch I would submit (realistically, they can issue a bug fix to a customer no problem - it is Open Source after all). In fact, the community benefits more from this support, because they'll also be contributing test cases and an intellisense annotated version. And they're going to be building on it themselves. I guess the goodwill they get from this move outweighs the money they will have to spend supporting it (and the fact that it's a mature and stable framework probably help a lot, too).

Very cool.