No, it wouldn't. Let's be honest, people would say it's from Microsoft and not use it for that very reason. Could be better than JVM and still most wouldn't use it. Linus was right, the hatred of Microsoft is a disease, and a lot of people in the open source community suffer from it.

Microsoft cast it upon itself. When you cry wolf all the time, nobody comes to help.

Microsoft can't let go. They can't say "this code is now open and no strings attached". They can say "but not really". They can say "but don't touch anything". Microsoft can't open.

What they can do is okay for consumers. Consumers will download whatever software available and use that. Developers? Hell no. Developers don't trust openness that can be revoked. Because this means their product stops working.

Then how do you explain that with mono? It's open source, but since it used MS's specs, with OS license, it has been vilified by the open source community. The reality of the matter is that while developers like to think they're rational, they're just as emotional as any non-developer. Their decisions are driven by emotions, by their hatred for MS or some other company / technology, hence the disease Linus was talking about.

How is it vilified? De Icaza loved it and pushed everywhere. Gnome played with it.

But mono is not .Net. I mean, if you look at Java, there is a very strict process which a JVM implementation must undergo in order to be called Java (and still there are a dozen of such implementations). It means it behaves predictably and have every one of the required APIs. And most of development tools are written in Java.

On the other hand, with .Net we have Microsoft implementation on Windows - and we have everything else. .Net on Windows has a massive number of APIs (many of those system dependent), hatches into COM, can easily use native code and libraries. Most .Net tools only work on Windows and are written as a mixture of native code, bytecode and COM. And mono is a second class citisen forever. It will never have all those limitless APIs and will never have all the tooling. It is extremelly unlikely that developers (of proprietary, in-house, server software) who use OS X or Linux as their development environment will ever adopt it. Nobody likes to be second class. Programming is painful enough even without that.

It has been, and it still is, thankfully to a somewhat lesser degree. Even Stallman said "we should discourage people from writing programs in C#". This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Whether .NET is different from Mono is not what I argue. Mono brought a MS-inspired technology to Linux so they got under the MS hatred umbrella. There was and still is a purely knee-jerk / emotional reaction to whatever they bring to the table.

I also remember how Stallman praised the starting of two GNU projects to reimplement .Net.

Anyway, Stallman is not a good example of vilifying anything. He's the strictest man in town. He is afraid of everything. Rightfully so. But he's not a representative sample of the community.

That would mean that there aren't any .net developers.

I don't think that necessarily true. Maybe it is for "the open source community" in terms of Stalanites.

OTOH lots of people use and love OSS including very profit driven startups and Apple "fanboys". Being able to write C# using Visual Studio under OS X and deploy to Linux would be killer app for a lot of startups and of course whatever stack gets used by the popular startups will be lionised.