Oxite, Microsoft's open source web content management system
Janus Boye has blog post describing a new web content management system from Microsoft. Janus reports that the intent is to make a simple web publishing platform which is more suitable for external websites than its flagship MOSS2007 offering. The most notable aspect of the Oxite is not its functionality or its positioning, it is its license. Oxite is distributed under an OSI certified license: the Microsoft Public License.
From poking around a bit, Oxite seems to be a project introduced by some MSDN developers who needed a platform on which to build MIX Online (Microsoft's big developer conference. Here is their description of Oxite). We all know that Microsoft's mainstream content management offerings would not be up to the task for this kind of open community site. I am guessing that the code was first released under the auspices of developer network education and code sharing. I am not sure if Microsoft has any business model behind the project other than to keep .NET developers happily buying Visual Studio. Still, the Microsoft developer community is huge and I could see them hungry to participate in a community project that would be an answer PHP projects like Drupal and WordPress. The code is hosted on CodePlex (Microsoft's version of Source Forge) and there are already 2,324 downloads since its December 5 release.