Microsoft’s evolution towards a major open source player has reached the next step with the introduction of the .NET Foundation. The purpose of the foundation is to “be the steward of a growing collection of open source technologies for.NET”.

The founding members include six from non-Microsoft companies:

Miguel de Icaza of Xamarin.

Laurent Bugnion of IdentityMine

Niels Hartvig of Umbraco

Nigel Sampson of Compiled Experience

Anthony von der Hoom of Glimpse

Paul Betts of GitHub

Currently there are 24 projects in the foundation, mostly donated by Microsoft and Xamarin.

While the community reaction has been generally positive, one point of contention is the lack of mention for Silverlight or WPF. With Silverlight on the web being completely depreciated and WPF in maintenance mode, developers were hoping Microsoft would open source the aging bits.