Something that flitted across my google reader lately was the top 10 reasons to consider using Silverlight, the new cross-platform Flash competitor from Microsoft. Reason number 10 was a mystery:  

“Ah… #10. I can’t reveal this yet – there’s a big surprise up our collective corporate sleeve that will be announced at MIX. I hate to hold back on you, but anticipation is part of the pleasure, as my mother used to tell me as a child when I was waiting impatiently for Christmas to come!”

Source: Tim Sneath : Introducing Microsoft Silverlight

Presumably, this can only mean Microsoft is open-sourcing large chunks of this new platform of theirs. No, seriously. It makes sense, they’re going up against Flash, and one of the only ways to compete against something that’s got wide market adoption and is ”free as in beer” is to release a competitor that’s ”free as in speech”. Having better features just won’t do it, when the opposition already owns the market. Microsoft has been trying to paint themselves as the less evil empire for a while now, so it just makes sense to build something major and open source it. Evolve or die, as they say, and they’ve well and truly given up claiming that Open Source is just another word for communism.  They’ve even got a lab dedicated to interop with open source technologies,  blogging at Port 25.  

Anyway, the real question is: which bits will be open sourced, and what licence are they going to choose? If they want to have any credibility at all they’d better pick something OSI-approved. For style points, they should pick the MPL. I wonder what Mozcorp would make of that one…anyway, I expect my friends Mary and Simon will tell me I’m completely off base with this, but I thought I’d hang it out there just in case I’m right  

 BTW The answer to the question in the title, I suspect, is no. It’s probably not going to gain significant adoption vs Flash, even if it’s open source. But it will be interesting to watch.