Eh - I don't really know that dead is the right term, and I think it mostly served it's purpose (It's actually still getting fairly regular commits, but I agree

Eh - I don't really know that dead is the right term, and I think it mostly served it's purpose (It's actually still getting fairly regular commits, but I agree that it's no longer keeping pace with dot net core) I would also draw a pretty clear distinction between C# the language, and something like WinForms. And that's really the whole point - implementations differ in functionality exposed and features worked on (hell - just the compatibility issues and differences between clang/GCC/MSVC is a great example). The corporate implementation is usually the most feature full because it has the most resources poured into it. That's not a problem. That's the community being able to take advantage of those resources. If/when the company stops being a useful partner, they're free to ditch them and fork (and this is historically how things like Linux/OpenBSD/Gnu tooling exist...) So again - if you have a real problem with using the corporate release, use the open versions. Contribute to them. But I don't find it a compelling argument to say that just because a language is sponsored by a company we should avoid it. Doubly so if the corporate version is licensed well.