Why .Net should become independent
blog.jonathanchannon.com
blog.jonathanchannon.com
I'd say that the incentives for this just aren't there. Most .net developers (like me) appear to be happy with the Microsoft tooling and not having to constantly learn this weeks fashionable framework. Even while many of us recognise that a lot of amazing innovation is going on in the OSS space. Our employers seem to be happy with the well-integrated nature of the platform and the stability that comes with somewhat less choice.
.net is fairly independent. The specs are public, and there are a few OSS implementations. You can run it on a Mac or Linux box, or even Pis and microcontrollers. Companies like Xamarin are building apparently successful businesses on top of .net. If you want to use indie libraries and frameworks then, on the whole, there are out there. And Microsoft doesn't show any signs of wanting to sue anyone for any of this.
I'd go so far as to say (at least on the ASP.NET side) they're trying to _encourage_ community participation. Wasn't NuGet a community project before it was baked into Visual Studio? I'm pretty sure they're now shipping the JSON.NET library in one or more of the core project templates, rather than write their own.
Meanwhile, we're buying their tools and using their languages in the enterprise, where the real money is. As a .NET developer for a decade now, I'm perfectly happy with the platform and tooling; it's the best of its kind. The OP complains about EF, MVC, and other libraries, but honestly they are some of the best designed platforms out there. There are always some kinks, but who has used Ruby on Rails without having to make some significant workarounds or hacks to get it running? No platform can anticipate everything. Meanwhile, clients need to install only one package to make everything in the stack work. Compare to rubygems.