Microsoft open sourced their .NET platform today.

Superficially, this is a huge deal: a proprietary platform at the heart of their development offerings is now available under an MIT license. Fantastic! This has been a long time coming and illustrates that Microsoft has turned a corner.

I think this is undeniably a good thing. It's also a fantastic thing for Microsoft.

It's not that .NET is going to be maintained by the community and Microsoft is leaving it to fend for itself. Instead, they will continue to direct the project - but it will be available on more platforms, and support a more diverse array of hardware. It also lowers the barrier for third-party companies to participate in their ecosystem. In effect, the community's enthusiasm will help spread their product, and will improve its quality and development.

They'll continue to make money on Visual Studio, on Windows, on their countless developer support packages. But now these offerings are more valuable, because their platform is available in more places, to more people.

And it makes them look awesome, forward-thinking, and community-minded, to boot.

It's a vote of confidence in their proprietary software that adds value to the platform. Visual Studio is a very fully-featured IDE; most of Microsoft's other products are similarly strong. The problem has always been that the platform is limited by an enterprise mindset.

Meanwhile, Internet Explorer has transformed from a terrible product that was literally destroying the web into a standards-based platform that works well on a variety of platforms. And Office, Microsoft's bread and butter, is happily running on my Nexus 5.

I'm excited about Microsoft's future, for the first time in ... well, ever. And I'm interested to see where they take the platform from here.