Reply to post: Microsoft is STILL not your friend

Microsoft is STILL not your friend

If anyone has had any experience with Microsoft, then none of this should be in any way surprising.

Admittedly, Amazon is coming at this from a position to make themselves more money, and that's O.K. Amazon isn't the group that's proclaiming to all the world the open source bona fides of .Net.

Microsoft is determined to get get as many developers as possible to use .Net. They know that to do that it needs to be seen as a 'safe and open' programming framework. Currently their biggest competition on the desktop and more importantly on the server is Linux. So what do they do? They partner with Canonical to make the inferior Linux environment, inferior to native Linux, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL, WSL1, WSL2). They leave key portions of .Net Windows only. Ironically, the new MAUI *universal* windowing toolkit for .Net, the one that Microsoft is determined NOT to work on a Linux desktop for Linux desktop apps, originated in Mono Forms. You remember that open source project created to bring .Net to Linux? It's come full circle. The Linux windowing technology has been repurposed, and limited, to only writing Windows, MacOS, Android, and IOS apps.

While Java is a bit long in the tooth, and there's always Sun's erratic legal presence, .Net isn't a safe, universal replacement. Unless you are willing to limit yourself to the Microsoft ecosystem.

We need to look for a truly open source, vendor unencumbered, free to use and contribute to languages and set of frameworks if we are ever going to have the freedom to create the best for our companies and ourselves. Right now these are the markedly unsexy old school languages; C, C++ and even old timers like COBAL and FORTRAN. Some newcomers are showing promise: Rust, Python, Go, etc.

Companies like Microsoft will only succeed if people let them. .Net, especially C# is a very nice language (I've done a bit of coding in it myself) and a nice evolution of Java. The problem is that C#, .Net and the entire ecosystem isn't actually, in any real sense, independent of Microsoft. Microsoft's goals will always take precedence. Even in the ostensibly 'independent' .Net Foundation, Microsoft retains out sized influence and direct behind the scenes powers.

Either Microsoft has to give up "all" control over .Net, or we would all (save those who realize and want to remain in a non-open Microsoft playground) do better to use something else.