Microsoft and Open Source

Like every other .Net blogger on the planet, I have to comment on the news that Microsoft is incorporating jQuery into Visual Studio. This is awesome news! I hope this means Microsoft will start to embrace Open Source software, and most importantly stop releasing inferior products to compete with Open Source projects. In my opinion projects like MS Unit Testing, Unity, Linq2Sql, Entity Framework, SourceSafe, and Team Foundation Server, are wasted man hours. In all cases there are superior Open Source alternatives (NUnit, Windsor, NHibernate, Subversion and Git, to name some of my favourites). Microsoft should only be competing with Open Source when they have something to add, and not just simply make inferior copies. As this news suggest Microsoft is now moving in a new direction, where they add tooling support of OSS into Visual Studio. Why couldn't they have done that years ago? A nice visual designer for NHibernate is a welcome addition to VS. Support for NUnit out of the box is another. And finally add support for a decent source control system like Subversion. In all I like the way Microsoft is heading. It seems like there is an ongoing change of culture in Redmond. They have hired a lot of great advocates of OSS in the last couple of years. Perhaps they now can muster the strength to fight the armies of lawyers, which haunts every big corporation, and introduce some good engineering and coming sense.