I can't imagine a more depressing outcome for the ecosystem than .NET OSS projects becoming self-funded acquihires.

Microsoft will retard its own ecosystem, again, and will:

1. Acquire its biggest contributors and remove their creative freedom
2. Push them into other ecosystems https://twitter.com/Horusiath/status/1265533947833978880

Let's take a trip back in time, to 2014, when .NET OSS was a pathetic ghetto - http://www.aaronstannard.com/the-profound-weakness-of-the-net-oss-ecosystem/ - saying out loud "I am a .NET developer" at a tech meetup was a surefire way to get made fun of by Node, Ruby, Python, and even Java developers.

So how we get there at a time when every other ecosystem was exploding out of control with activity? Remember: this was the apex of NoSQL becoming mainstream, distributed systems and cloud computing becoming commonplace, and so on.

We got there because Microsoft, through decades of hamfisted top-down control, which is still how its organization is run today, stood in diametric opposition to the very concept of OSS and believed its proprietary, backwards-compatible-forever(tm) way would prevail

Any popular OSS project that came along that its own customers demanded, Microsoft would fast-follow and imitate in much the same way it does with proprietary products. Entity Framework, those god awful AJAX controls, you name it.

Where the dam broke was with Ruby on Rails / MVC

With Rails web developers had unprecedented productivity - and WebForms simply couldn't match that. So http://ASP.NET  MVC was born and began playing catch up.

Right as all of that was happening, WebSockets gets released - and bam, Windows and IIS can't support it without heavy duty patching. And this is right as Node comes out with frameworks like Socket IO which make it fun and easy to do.

Take all of that and multiply it by how badly Amazon Web Services was kicking the fucking shit out of Azure and you now have a problem that demands culture change.

But what was the real issue all along here? That the product strategy was bad?

Microsoft's fundamental issue then was viewing itself as being at the center of its own ecosystem and having to have an answer for every problem any customer in it might have.

As the problem space grew their ability to do that at all collapsed from underneath them.

And customers had to start looking towards Amazon, the Java ecosystem, Node, and a lot of other places to get their work done.

So Microsoft has turned a new leaf since and done a turnaround - Azure is now an open platform and they support any and all customers.

But fundamentally, the culture is still alive and well inside .NET specifically - they never had a strong incentive to stop. And all of the creativity that .NET Core has brought to the ecosystem will ultimately rot away if Microsoft doesn't value supplier diversity.