It seems to me to depend on what side of the world you land Dev or Ops. Ops is much easier on the OSS side. RDPing in to a hundred boxes to click a button is the height tediousness, the oss alternative is running a script(and the tools that can make that target all one hundred at once). On the Dev side there is nothing that matches C# on CLR. Java isn't conceptually different but it is missing so many niceties as to make it distasteful. Scala or Clojure maybe, but they don't have the richer environment that C# does (certainly not a reason to dimiss them out of hand.)