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Comment by Dinux | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the article at all. The point the author is making has less to do with OSS and more with competition. Business is never 'fair'. The reason people flock to AWS/Azure is because of ease of use, integration with other systems etc.. The burden of maintaining two (or more) ecosystems just because one is 'a little better' isn't worth it. Sure there will always be an alternative that fits the product/team better.

Besides, MS and alike have thousands of products and services. Are they supposed to point to every-other-alternative out there before they enter the market?

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I don't think it is necessarily about being fair it is just that the philosophy of developers in the .NET world has always been if MS has something then that is the thing we use. I've felt that within Java there are usually more competing products and flavors.

Often the product MS provides is good enough but I remember in the tail end of the web forms disaster there were some good open source MVC libraries inspired by the Java ecosystem but they never really got traction and people kept building things with shitty web forms. This is until MS came with ASP.NET MVC and people started to switch.

I don't think Microsoft wants to kill alternatives. I think they really want a healthy ecosystem to get more developers using .NET but they also want to be able to create a complete developer experience and that sometimes clashes and kills other products due to the culture.

There are definitely cases where the community wins out because it delivers better quality - Newtonsoft.JSON eventually was recommended by MSDN documentation instead of the built-in .NET JSON APIs and the new in-development API is being written by the author of Newtonsoft.

That is true and that was a pretty big shift and together with embracing open source more, going all in on Azure, supporting Linux etc. there has been changes and that has reflected somewhat in the community as well.

I also think people being used to npm in the frontend will make them more likely to start looking around nuget for things that can support their use case better than what exists by Microsoft.

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