Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
This sort of thing has been MS&#x27;s playbook since I was a kid, or earlier.  It surprises me that people are still surprised when things like this happen.  I especially think someone with Miguel de Icaza&#x27;s experience should know better[0].<p>It&#x27;s interesting to see the generational difference here. Many of my somewhat-younger (even only by 7-10 years) programmer&#x2F;techie friends just don&#x27;t remember the Microsoft of the 80s and 90s, and see all the &quot;good&quot; they&#x27;ve been doing with the open source community in more recent times, and think MS is a pretty good corporate citizen in the tech world.<p>But in reality, MS has just done a great job whitewashing their image[1] in the past 15 years, especially in the past 8 years since Ballmer stepped down and Nadella took the reins. I do believe they&#x27;re a better, less anti-competitive company than they used to be. But they&#x27;re still the same company in many ways. I think a big part of their &quot;play nice&quot; strategy was born out of necessity, since they heavily dropped the ball in the late 90s&#x2F;early 00s when the internet&#x2F;WWW was really coming into its own, and then again in the early&#x2F;mid 10s when Windows Phone failed miserably. They just lost the clout to do the anti-competitive bullshit they used to pull. But the desire to do all this stuff is still there.<p>[0] It was clear to me that MS intended .NET to be a wholly-proprietary, Windows-only technology until de Icaza and co. built Mono, when MS grudgingly embraced it.  This proprietary extension feels like their standard follow-on of &quot;extend and extinguish&quot;, though it&#x27;s coming a bit later than we&#x27;d expect.<p>[1] Bill Gates has also done an amazing job rehabilitating his image through philanthropy.  A lot of people forget how his actions at MS probably held back progress in the computing industry for at least a decade (or two?), through forced lock-in and anti-competitive behavior.