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The fact that this is so out in the open on Github is pretty amazing - shows how much Microsoft is changing.

Can you imagine the feature list of C# 1.0 being discussed like this?

Yups. They day I read their massive open source release announcements I knew that MS is from now on not the same company it was.

Mahatma Gandhi supposedly said: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Which I think is very applicable to MS attitude to open source.

Now they have a new attitude: If you can't beat'm, join'm.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they embrace you, then they extend you, then they extinguish you.

That'll be quite a trick with an MIT license, community promise on patents, and published language specs.

But this is not as new as some may think. The Entity Framework team uses a transparent design process [1] since 2008 and the C# team also opened the design process to the public some time ago. But it is of course getting more wide spread and even more open.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2008/06/23/transpar...

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