[nl]

Sorry, but that is a nonsense excuse.

The (now abandoned) Spring.NET project[1] was started in 2004, not too long after (Java) Spring started.

It's easy to criticize Java Spring, but it's a good example of a long-lived successful Open Source project. It's also easy to argue that Spring isn't as useful in .NET as in Java.

But I can pull up many, may other examples (the .NET Lucene port etc).

My point is that the .NET OSS ecosystem is NOT a new thing, but it keeps getting killed off. The typical example is that a .NET project starts to solve a problem, gets it 30-40% solved, then Microsoft releases a project that solves a different 30-40% but sucks all the oxygen out of the ecosystem.

[1] http://springframework.net/news.html

[amadeusw]

While I agree with you that Microsoft was getting in the way of the ecosystem, I believe that since last year this is no longer the case.

I tried, and couldn't find exact date when Microsoft officially endorsed Newtonsoft.Json as THE way to handle json in .net. But I believe that this happened just last year. Look, in 2011 Scott Hanselman blogged about this library [1] and the comments (esp. the first one) are pretty interesting. Here, .NET tried to solve a problem and community did a better job, and just recently Microsoft recognized it.

[AdieuToLogic]

> The (now abandoned) Spring.NET project

It's been abandoned? (serious question) That really is too bad. It was a solid project used on several .NET projects in which I participated "back in the day."

BTW, I completely agree with your summary point. There appears to be a cultural rejection of .NET OSS projects.

[batou]

It slowly fell behind. I made the mistake of using it for a product pre-MVC. When MVC came along they jumped the shark and we ended up ripping it out and replacing bits with Autofac and some light weight abstractions we put together ourselves.