I was reading over at Jeremy Zawodny's blog today that Yahoo has opened their UI components and some AJAX stuff along with their User Interface design patterns. This is pretty darned cool for us web developers that want to leverage AJAX but don't want to re-invent the wheel. The coolest part about all of this is they released the components under the BSD license, the LEAST restrictive open-source license around. Too cool!

Going even deeper than the free beer that we have just been given, this speaks volumes about Yahoo's commitment to the internet community and the improvement of the web. By releasing these components to developers under a very lucrative license I hope this prompts people to take full advantage of the components and design patterns to improve their web applications. This could help to bring about a whole new level of quality in web applications.

As an aside I noticed that Yahoo doesn't have any public applications out yet that use any of the components they have released. Maybe this is a precursor to some cool new services Yahoo is going to introduce. Perhaps a calendar or a better, more tightly integrated groups site? No matter what it is Yahoo is definitely a company to keep an eye on. I will be very interested to see what they turn out over the next year.