Microsoft's approach to open source software and open source projects, in general, has softened over the years from the "open source is evil" stance it took at the turn of the century to the one where open source is now valued, embraced, and recognized as an integral part of the development ecosystem. Microsoft is now so committed to open source that they are developing a number of frameworks in an open manner including the ASP.NET Web Stack (http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com) and providing contributions for a number of third-party open source projects such as jQuery, Node.js, and Git.

With the amount of open source now available and the acceptance of open source as a normal part of development, developers needed an easy way to locate and find open source packages that could be used in their own projects; much like the package managers of other languages such as Ruby and Python. As a result, Microsoft supported an open source project to create a package manager...