Good point; I wrote this a little carelessly, reacting a little bit, and should elaborate my thoughts.
The open source .NET ecosystem - and hopefully Microsoft supporting that - does have a continued place as long as it can remain relevant to the technology audience. The .NET framework has pushed plenty of boundaries in programming language research, features and functionality, for example.
What I should have focused on is the sense that I picked up from the article that free is somehow bad, and that it's justified to punish and deride people who have a (in my view, reasonable) expectation of free and open source software. It is self-evidently true that we can and do make and distribute all kinds of free and open source software at no cost.
The tendency to belittle people for expecting zero cost appears as a result, I think, of a kind of gaslighting and stockholm syndrome where people in the ecosystem have _expected_ to have to pay large amounts for software that is in many ways no better than FOSS alternatives - especially as time continues on, resulting in convergence of defect analysis, fixes, and features in popular FOSS projects.
That's a background that skews towards corporate and first-world experiences, and it's not (I don't think) aligned with the expectations of the next few generations of developers worldwide.
What .NET and other popular technologies - proprietary or otherwise - will do for those future generations is shape their ideas and visions about what technology is capable of. And I hope everyone would want that to be as optimistic as possible.
I can see your point. People will go where they can get the best deal and nobody likes having the rug pulled out from under them and suddenly having to solve licensing problems. But I can see the article’s standpoint too. Building multi-million or -billion dollar edifices on top of the free labor of FOSS maintainers is arguably exploitative and unsustainable, and the idea of being unwilling to pay a small fee for something “critical to the business” is somewhat absurd on its face.
Sure, and I hear the concern regarding exploitation of (potentially overworked, underpaid) developers and maintainers.
But if a thousand people receive a free (perhaps sugar-addled) lunch from one of a few providers -- while collectively having the resources to feed each other free lunches (more sustainably, long-term) -- it doesn't seem fair to attack and blame those people for asking difficult questions about their food source. Even if they might seem entitled today, they're asking questions that will probably appear more than fair in retrospect.
(I realize these analogies don't fit perfectly, and I'm aware I'm reframing the issue, perhaps awkwardly)
With software, fortunately, it may be business critical, but it's rarely personal-health critical the way that nutrition is (unless, perhaps, we have already incorporated infrastructure too deeply into ourselves as humans).
