Bing Maps Silverlight Control should be Open Source

Question

If you look at the ASP.NET MVC project, you can see a very successful Microsoft project that is Open Source. Although, they don't openly accept community contributions, you can still take the source code, modify it any way necessary, and deploy to your servers. Even if you don't compile your own version, it can be VERY useful to see just how they are implementing something internally to help get tricks to use in your own apps/libraries.

Now, if you look at ASP.NET MVC in comparison to the Bing Maps Silverlight Control, they have one huge thing in common: They are FREE! The incentive or financial justification to develop ASP.NET MVC is ultimately to sell more Windows Server and Visual Studio licenses. Now if we compare that to the Bing Maps Silverlight Control you'll see that they aren't very different since the financial justification to developing the Bing Maps Silverlight Control is to sell more Bing Maps for Enterprise licensing contracts, and it closely relates to selling more Visual Studio licenses.

Since the Bing Maps Silverlight Control is developed and supported with the same financial justification as ASP.NET MVC, it just makes plain sense to release it as Open Source.

Why not release the Bing Maps Silverlight Control as Open Source under the same Microsoft Public License?

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Microsoft MVP - Windows Live Platform
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