You are right, and the fear & distrust go both ways. The .NET "community" is almost entirely Microsoft fans and a good number of shills. The shills are rabidly

You are right, and the fear & distrust go both ways. The .NET "community" is almost entirely Microsoft fans and a good number of shills. The shills are rabidly anti-FOSS, the Microsoft employees are about evenly divided between FOSS-hostile and MS-provincial (with a tiny minority pro-FOSS), and the rest are just unaware of anything that Microsoft isn't hyping. It's very hard to get momentum behind a free software project on .NET, and once you do Microsoft and their shill army kills it by reinvention, heavy promotion of their vaporware, and badmouthing the competition. It's really hard to work against the culture, and the dominant .NET culture sees Redmond as the One True Source for anything worth using.