Microsoft strengthens .NET open source credentials

Microsoft today announced the .NET Foundation, which will act as an independent organisation to foster open source projects around the development framework.

Over the next months, .NET foundation will invite companies to join the organisation and build a board of directors.

Licensing for the .NET Foundation projects has not yet been decided, but will likely be Apache or Eclipse -style agreements, Microsoft's vice president of the developer division Soma Somasegar told TechCrunch.

Presently, the .NET Foundation is hosting 24 open source projects including the recently announced Roslyn compiler platform and the ASP.NET family of tools, such as the API for the Hadoop web client and Map Reduce.

The Windows Azure .NET software development kit and Windows Phone Toolkit are also part of the .NET Foundation's initial open source projects.

Linux guru and GNOME free desktop environment founder Miguel de Icaza is among those involved in the .NET Foundation as a community leader.

De Icaza's company Xamarin has already contributed six open source .NET projects to the foundation.