Leaving .net

He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own "blessed" framework.

Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are not using the system for the love of hacking. No. These people want to learn marketable skills and get/keep jobs. Whatever MS pushes out is what the market will buy, and hire for. What do you think killed Borland? Certainly not the lack of excellent quality products. Rather, their incompatibility with Microsoft. Even if your engineering is superior to Microsoft's, you can't afford to break rank, since the market will not follow your lead.

I went to a D.C. area meeting of early .NET adopters, a group of hardcore MS-specialists working for gur'ment. One of the organizers had a fat .NET book on the table, which he slapped with his palm three times and said: "Gentlemen, this is where the money is at". You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier.

.NET is nice and you can do pretty things with it, but corporate platforms are first and foremost careers and cash-cows for people. The broke mofos are out there hacking on GHC and SBCL.

    To those who want to be part of a vibrant community of passionate developers
    crafting new and innovative solutions, start hanging out with people who
    *aren’t tied to a particular language or framework*. Get to your local user
    groups. All of them. Get a github account and start forking the hell out of
    everything!

If shit hits the fan in the .NET stack for a big enough corporate project, someone in the office can phone/email MS and get support for their problem. If a bug is found in the stack itself, it won't languish unsolved in bug trackers for years, like many OSS bugs do. MS will probably fix it in their next cycle, and the corporate devs won't have to waste their time figuring out the nuts and bolts of the stack to fix the bugs themselves, like in OSS.

So I think it's this requirement for enterprise support that keeps MS from accepting OSS patches and locking everyone in--it would be too much work to track, validate, and test 3rd party patches when they can just fix it themselves with their own devs and keep going to sleep on their piles of money surrounded by many beautiful women.

Unfortunately this sort of view isn't very compatible with the indie developer ideal, or the ideals the author holds--which might one of the many reasons why you see so much Rails/PHP development in the non-enterprise space.