In the blog post that's an breakdown of ms project, yes. Used to show how ms is doing with open source? yes. because .net framework (and implementation of runtime,compiler/blc) was owned by ms (mono is another implementation of the runtime/compiler/bcl).

But for some components is ok to contribute there:

- mono(xamarin) was already migrating to use open source components like the bcl (corefx) after the initial open source of code by ms. It's like dont write two times the same stuff.

- coreclr: the .net core runtime

- corefx: the standard library (base class library like io etc), used by .net fw (win) and .net core and partially by mono

- roslyn: that's the c#/vb compiler, also mono is trying to reuse that

- cli: it's the sdk for building projects. Can the project system changed? yes, but not needed now (.net core it's boostrapping another xplat runtime so need tools). as a personal note, the cli team doesn an awesome job to make it easy to contribute

and some notes:

- asp.net is a web framework, it's used a lot, nice ppl contribute. who like servicestack/nancy/suave, use that instead.

- fsharp (http://fsharp.org/) was and is already driven by community, and lang decision are in repo https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design by community and lead by @dsyme

And you should also check dotnet foundation pulse and community projects (like Nancy/Nunit/Akka.net/mbrace).

Lots of the work done by ms can be useful for others, see Kestrel server (damn fast) who can be used by other web projects like Suave (https://github.com/SuaveIO/suave is a lib, not a framework :D)

- dnx was the predecessor of cli, and replaced by it (good job by aspnet team to boostrap xplat on netcore)

a lot of this post is around akka. I mean akka is also relativly new... It was released in 2006 so .NET still is in his early stage for such things. I mean Java actually only has akka because of scala. NIO in java is still bad and hard, netty makes that somewhat easier and also the big maintainer of Akka is not Oracle it's actually Lightbend. For me the post makes no sense since Scala didn't had much code out there at the beginnings as well, I took some years to have a various amount of useful projects. (more than two years...)

Not sure what the comment about NIO in Java was for, there are surely rough parts to it even in NIO2, however compared to the status quo, Java's NIO is like a breath of fresh air. Simply because it is hard to abstract over poll, select, epoll, kqueue, AIO, Windows' async sockets, etc and provide consistent behavior over all those supported platforms. Because of this the async I/O implementation in Mono has been broken for years ;-)

As for Akka, well Akka is really not about abstracting over I/O or a replacement for Netty, even though projects like akka-http exist. At this point Netty is so good, well tested and so widely deployed that nobody sane would even dream of replacing it, even though there are some people trying.

And on the .NET ecosystem, I really love what Microsoft is doing with it and how .NET Core is turning out, however open-source is definitely a big weakness of the ecosystem. In the Java world, Oracle is not driving anything other than Java the language and the runtime (i.e. the core). Not the IDE, not the frameworks or the tools being used. Everything else is provided by the community.

And when I click to view the source of some class or method in my IDE, I have my IDE automatically download the original source, instead of getting a decompiled one, because proprietary libraries are almost unheard of.