It is arguably also a bad business decision to shell out $$ for a language that isn't used at your company.
> It is arguably also a bad business decision to shell out $$ for a language that isn't used at your company.
What cost(s) are you thinking of here? .NET doesn't cost anything (monetarily). Some of the tools cost money but you can also get by in the .NET world with a command-prompt and text editor (I did as a hobbyist for quite some time).
I might be misunderstanding your statements, but it's also possible that you're misunderstanding .NET, I'm just trying to clarify which one it :)
as opposed to Java developers who are hmm...free ?
Things are slowly moving towards Open Source and cross platform, but .NET is far behind Java at this moment. It is moving fast, though.