The developer community was caught entirely off guard in November of 2014 when Microsoft Corp. abruptly announced that it’s open-sourcing its popular .NET application framework for Windows. Six quarters and countless code contributions later, however, it should come as much less of a surprise that the software giant is releasing the core components of Xamarin under a free license.

The company obtained the mobile development platform through its acquisition of the startup of the same name earlier this year for a reported $400-$500 million. Xamarin is used by over 1.3 million developers to write cross-platform applications using Microsoft’s C# programming language, a number that should increase even further once Redmond follows through with its open-source plans. Over the coming months, Satya Nadella’s firm plans to release the tools that the framework provides for turning raw code into working programs and a number of complementary libraries designed to automate other parts of the software lifecycle.

Chief among them is Xamarin.Forms, the secret ingredient that enables the platform to make an application compatible with multiple different operating systems in a hurry. The library speeds up the historically time-consuming process by automatically integrating functionality like touch commands with the appropriate function of the target device, which eliminates the bulk of the manual customization that developers have to perform. Once the package’s source-code becomes accessible to the public, large organizations with specialized requirements will be able to augment its capabilities as they see fit to better support their internal engineering teams.

But the move to make Xamarin free is designed first and foremost to benefit small-time application makers that couldn’t afford to buy a commercial license in the past. To make it as easily as possible to take advantage of the framework, Microsoft plans to incorporate the base version into Visual Studio, its flagship development tool, without imposing any restrictions on non-paying users. And in conjunction, the capabilities of the more expensive corporate edition will be baked into Visual Studio Enterprise. Redmond executives said at the Build conference where the move was announced that the company doesn’t plan to charge extra for subscriptions in the wake of the addition.

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