Don't let the title fool you, the next version of Windows in the making is most probably not going to be open sourced. However it would seem that today more than ever, Microsoft, the archetypal proprietary software company is going towards the Open Source.
Up until last summer, Microsoft's relationship with Open Source had been mostly about
spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) to the public opinion about Open Source. Sometimes criticizing Linux as a rival, often calling Open Source "property theft", it was clear that Microsoft did not believe in "community developed software".
Last July, the world was surprised to discover that Microsoft had
released 20 000 lines of code to the Linux kernel project, one of its biggest Open Source rivals. The code mainly consisted on drivers allowing Linux to run better on Hyper-V, Microsoft's equivalent of VMWare, Virtualbox or KVM.
The biggest surprise came yesterday, from the ASP.NET development team.
Announcing the release of the Beta of version 3 of their ASP.NET MVC framework, they also announce the release of NuPack. What is NuPack? From the article:
"NuPack is a free open source package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use .NET libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including, but not limited to, both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC).
NuPack enables developers who maintain open source projects [...] to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable. The client-side NuPack tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on."
In other words, NuPack is an Open Source product aimed at Open Source developers using .NET. If anything, the fact that Microsoft releases some code under an Open Source license proves that there
are viable economical models for Open Source inside capitalist corporate systems.