In what amounts to a monumental reversal of policy, Microsoft said Monday in a press release - so it's in writing - and publicly at TechEd in Barcelona that it's changing its licensing terms and will no longer restrict developers "to building solutions on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms only."

In the same press release it said it's committed to putting out its next-generation Visual Studio 2008 development environment and its .NET Framework 3.5 upgrade by the end of the month ahead of its "official" launch on February 27 along with the delayed Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

The company will morph into a kinder, gentler Microsoft with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and the VS 2008 SDK, which promise developers full use of the graphical capabilities in Vista.

Microsoft said it plans to create one of its shared source licensing programs for the Premier-level partners in its VSIP program so they can see VS IDE source code for debugging purposes and to simplify the process of integrating their products with the thing.

The move obviously suggests that Microsoft is under increasing pressure from the open source movement and is acting to protect its precious developer base.

Microsoft also announced the first downloadable Community Technology Preview (CPT) of its Synch Framework, which will allow offline and P2P collaboration using any protocol for any data type and any data store. Sync-enables ecosystem will follow customers wherever they go.