What is 'the community' and what do you expect from them? Looking at some recent technologies/libraries/tools released by Microsoft, there are alternatives to

What is 'the community' and what do you expect from them? Looking at some recent technologies/libraries/tools released by Microsoft, there are alternatives to all of them, and most of them were released well before Microsoft released theirs: NHibernate vs. Entity Framework Monorail vs ASP.NET MVC NUnit (and many others) vs Microsoft Test Autofac (and many others) vs MEF Spark (and many others) vs Razor OpenWrap vs NuGet Umbraco CMS vs Orchard CMS It's just that 80% (90%? 95%?) of .NET developers associate working on .NET with working in Visual Studio. And whenever Microsoft comes out with their version, there's always a 'tooling story'. LINQ to SQL is a great example: a limited technology with great tooling and documentation, just right amount of integration to get a lot of developers on board. Same with ASP.NET MVC, every official video will show how easy it is too add any of the M, V or C parts using Visual Studio. Ultimately the tools shouldn't matter that much, but in 'the .NET community' it matters a lot. In fact, I would say 70% of Microsoft strategy is 'get them hooked on the tools' and the other 30% is to always have something new coming up. I'm fine with that, I use ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, Entity Framework, and I mix 'n match with some of the great OSS libraries (like xUnit or Autofac). I'm comfortable with that (even when using WebForms) and I make a good living. And when I want to debug, I hit F5 and live is good. Don't forget that Codeplex is a pretty good move from Microsoft to make sure there is a healthy amount of OSS solutions available in the .NET space If this is what works for many developers, for venders and customers and for Microsoft, and the 'ecosystem' is thriving, AND there is STILL room for OSS... then I don't see a problem. There is no greater good... if this does NOT work for you, if this makes you unhappy, there are so many alternatives outside .NET. It doesn't mean that the .NET ecosystem should change. In fact, I don't think it ever will. The model works too good for Microsoft to just 'hand over the keys' to the community. Microsoft owns the platform, this is their strategy and it works.