Silverlight and Interoperability

I read something interesting on Scott Guthries blog about the release of Silverlight 2:

Interoperability

Today we are also announcing that Microsoft is partnering with Soyatec to sponsor additional tools for developing Silverlight applications using the cross platform Eclipse development platform.  Click here to learn more about this and download the free Silverlight Eclipse plugin.  Click here for a step-by-step tutorial that walks-through how to use their Eclipse tools today to build a Silverlight 2 application.

We are also announcing today that we are releasing the Silverlight XAML vocabulary and schema under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), which enables anyone to create products that read and write XAML for Silverlight.

This is a bit surprising but a good move I think. Scott Guthrie and the ASP team have also been creating the ASP MVC framework under an open source license so it shouldn’t be too much of a shock to see the focus on interoperability with Silverlight. I do like this trend though, I feel like it’s important to focus on interoperability and support open source as much as possible.