I was listening to the Hansel Minutes podcast from 11/24 talking about Moonlight.
To paraphrase, Scott made the comment that Microsofts attitude about open source is quickly changing, especially with the adoption of MVC architecture.
I admit I don't have the best 'big picture' grasp of what MVC means to the developement world, but specifically I want to know how does it benefit open source communities?
Anyone who releases any code as open source is doing something to benefit the open source community.
Think of the open source community as a giant wiki - the more information and ideas, the better the wiki is. You are benefiting stackoverflow by being here and contributing because any positive input adds to the greater good.
So Microsoft's contribution (for whatever it is worth) benefits the open source community because they are saying: "Here is how we decided to implement an MVC framework, please feel free to take a look".
Who know who may benefit from that? Perhaps many, perhaps none. That is the beauty of the thing.
In fact, MVC itself does not seem to have anything to do with open source specifically except that Ruby on Rails is inspired by it which is something that open source developers use and like. The primary thing about MVC and Microsoft open source strategy is that ASP.NET MVC, which is probably going to be an important thing for Microsoft, is released as open source software and it's being developed within the community.