[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.