

Why .Net should become independent - jchannon
http://blog.jonathanchannon.com/2013/05/29/why-net-should-become-independent/

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andyjohnson0
Hard to know what to make of this. The author's argument seems to be that he
wants to use c#, but also wants a greater diversity of libraries/tools in the
.net ecosystem so that he can get a job using those rather than Microsoft's
libraries. In other words, he wants it to have more OSS/Linux/Apple cool while
also remaining attractive to the more "conservative" organisations that are
big users of .net. I'm not sure this could work both ways.

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.

~~~
drharris
Agreed, and if anything they want people working with .NET even if they don't
control it. Their evangelists even encourage use of Mono, MonoTouch, etc. They
encourage open sourcing, and it's gradually becoming more and more common to
see C# code on GitHub. MVC allows any number of combinations of community-
sourced components rather than use EF/Razor/etc.

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.

