[kyllo]

I suppose a fringe benefit of open-sourcing .NET would be an eventual reduction in this phenomenon.

I mean, it doesn't really even make sense to have a closed-source application programming language in this day and age, where the community building and maintaining it is entirely employed by a single company. It just isn't efficient enough, the maintenance is intractable, and you end up with false starts because the whole thing is subject to the whims and shifting priorities of management.

Besides, Sun open-sourced Java back in 2006, already...

[jodrellblank]

I suppose a fringe benefit of open-sourcing .NET would be an eventual reduction in this phenomenon.

Why do you think that would be the case?

When I think "open-source" I think "fragmented, lots of utterly terrible things, lots of half-finished false-starts".

[kyllo]

Sure, but you can feel free to never use or support the false starts. In open source they are allowed to die. In a closed ecosystem they have a tendency to live on as deprecated zombies.

[nikanj]

Which is really good, because at Microsoft's size, there's often a non-trivial number of companies who drank the kool-aid and invest hundreds of man-years to building a system using those false starts.

[kyllo]

Not even just companies, but also governments and entire countries.

Since the late 1990s, South Korea has had a law that any website transmitting any sort of banking/financial data was required to use a specific ActiveX plugin for encryption. This law was in place for years after ActiveX was officially deprecated, and I believe that it has only just recently been amended to allow other crypto implementations.