I remember ALT.NET, and I would not retroactively declare a success. What it did was push into the open the fact that the Microsoft of the day could not effecti

I remember ALT.NET, and I would not retroactively declare a success. What it did was push into the open the fact that the Microsoft of the day could not effectively handle having rival technologies on their platform, open or closed source. Their strategy at the time was to try to provide a solution for every single product category, to the point of maintaining various no-cost but proprietary tools and libraries just to fill gaps (most of which are now abandoned).