Except that those ideological reasons are more important than faster and better... even assuming that is true.

Except those same startups are more than happy using FOSS tools paid with Facebook, Amazon and Google money.

The three heroes of ethics, ideal working conditions and examples of behaviour towards the society in general.

What reasons? Do you have an example? Ideological is usually the opposite of rational.

"I don't trust, based on their past behaviour, that these people will pick a path that is consistent with mine" is a perfectly rational reason based on ideology.

Ok, so what path is interfering with the ability to build faster and better exactly?

Looking at their current behavior from open-source to VSCode to .NET 5 shows that it's a more compelling choice today than ever before. This is actually rational.

What ideological reasons? Are you claiming SV startups use open source alternatives because of "free software" or what?

The only reason most startups use open source ecosystems is economics.

.Net core is free and open source and compatible with linux

Only since 2016, and it wasn't really usable until a couple of years ago. Most third-party .Net libraries still assume you're in a Windows world. The reality is that .Net is very competitive in terms of development speed if you deploy on Windows; elsewhere you'll likely have to figure out stuff and suffer from being on a second-class platform.

IMHO selling .Net to unix devs is a bit like trying to sell icecream in Siberia.

> The reality is that .Net is very competitive in terms of development speed if you deploy on Windows; elsewhere you'll likely have to figure out stuff and suffer from being on a second-class platform.

That's nowhere near reality, .NET 5 (FKA .NET Core) has flawless first-class support for Linux, the whole deployment experience is even better on Linux since you have access to the entire Linux tools + ecosystem. Which I've been deploying to for years, I still develop on Windows but only ever deploy our .NET (Core) Apps to Linux (since the same App runs flawlessly on Windows + Linux).

The Windows-only .NET Framework (excl Mono) is now considered legacy, it's continually supported but all new development + features are being invested in the .NET 5+ cross-platform runtime which is now what ".NET" refers to.

Even though you may be right I’d still fear being a second class citizen on Linux. And I’ve heard nothing but positive things for .NET.

Not that Electron is appealing either but I get the draw fully.

This fear is unfounded, the primary value proposition of .NET (FKA .NET Core) is that it's a high-performance cross-platform runtime that has first-class support for Linux.

It's been designed to be "cloud-ready" from the start where it's adopted a high-performance core with a leaner, modular runtime that supports side-by-side installations since Microsoft wants it to run well in the Cloud of which all cloud providers (inc. Azure) predominantly deploy to Linux VMs, whose trend will continue to dominate.

You can view the supported Linux distributions on their installation page which includes Linux binaries for x64, Arm32 + Arm64 including package managers for its supported Linux distributions (Alpine,CentOS,Debian,Fedora,openSUSE,RHEL,SLES,Ubuntu) [1]. As well as maintaining multiple Docker configurations for popular Distros [2].

With Linux now being a supported platform means if you have run into an issue you can report it where their full-time resources will resolve it. The old days of using .NET to push Windows is gone, the future is the cloud and Azure doesn't care if you run Linux or Windows VMs, it's all the same to them, they're still collecting rent for usage of their servers by the hour.

[1] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/5.0

[2] https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-dotnet-aspnet

Azure runs more Linux than Windows, including its own services. Linux and mobile are first-class platforms. Everything is compatible unless you specifically use Windows-only APIs. Do you have any examples of 3rd-party libraries that aren't supported?

.NET Core (now .NET 5) has changed the entire ecosystem and has been production-ready for years, and is even making cutting-edge advancements like Blazor which offers the first real alternative to Javascript on the frontend. The reality is that .NET is a top choice for both development speed and application performance across all platforms today.

Maybe more like selling snow cones in Siberia.

But not the whole ecosystem. How about SQL Server or thousands of third parties?

SQL Server isn't part of .NET, and no different than using any other proprietary database. I'm not sure what you mean by 3rd-parties but .NET works with all the major open-source projects so you're not missing anything.