In 2002, when Microsoft first introduced the .NET platform, no one had imagined that it would become one of the most preferable development environments within a decade. With over 1.8 billion installations and 6 million developers worldwide, it retained the top spot in the technology world. And it got another life last week when Microsoft announced that it would open-source the entire server-side .NET stack under the MIT open-source license. The announcement was made by Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division, Soma Somasegar at company’s invitation-only Connect() event for developers in New York. He announced a new governance model through .NET Foundation, which is an independent forum to foster open development and collaboration around the growing collection of open source technologies for .NET. Everything from the ASP.NET Web tools, the languages, and even the underlying .NET runtime will be made available via .NET Foundation. The initial release will be a selection of libraries, with the rest of the stack releasing over the next few months. The company also announced the expansion of .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms and launched a new open source version of its flagship IDE, dubbed Visual Studio Community. Somasegar also gave a preview of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015.