Alt.NET 1 - Microsoft 0
There has been quite a lot of noise on the blogosphere and it all revolves around Microsoft.
This morning Jamie Cansdale's posted some correspondence between himself and Microsoft surrounding the support of TestDriven.NET in Microsoft's Express IDE's. Microsoft is unhappy that TestDriven.NET can plug in to the Express IDE's claiming that doing so is a violation of the licence agreement. Jamie has also lost his MVP award over this.
This comes as a big disappointment to me. It is a clear demonstration that Microsoft still does not get it. Martin Fowler sums up perfectly why I think so:
The attitude [of Microsoft] to open-source is a large part of [Microsoft's] problem. When Java appeared there were yawning gaps in its portfolio, and worse some dreadful standard tools in its API (visions of Entity Beans spring to mind). Those gaps and bad ideas were fixed by the open-source community. Ant gave us a build tool, EJB was displaced by Spring and Hibernate. .NET has also got its gaps, and again the open source community has stepped up to fill them. Yet Microsoft refuses to collaborate with these efforts, even seems to go out of its way to undermine them. I was particularly sickened by Microsoft's reaction to NUnit - an excellent XUnit testing tool, elements of whose design were lauded by Anders Hejlsberg at OOPSLA. Microsoft ended not just bringing out a competitive library, but deliberately making it incompatible. That's not the kind of reaction that encourages people to invest their time in the platform.
As a result of Microsoft's lock-in, proprietary bully tactics and copy-cat strategy to open source, many alpha geeks are moving away to more open platforms like Ruby on Rails. Others are becoming "Alt.NET".
And for a while I have been concerned about my position too. Am I going to be as marketable as a C# developer in three years time? Or should I diversify my skills and learn Ruby and Java?