I should start by saying I've always been a MS skeptic technically and thought their business practices abhorrent.

But right about now, I am starting to wonder if the amoral forces of capitalism are leading us to the verge of good things for all platforms materializing, and a win-win for the consumer (and in this case, developers developers dev *ahem*.) Since the mid-90's, Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons and has put a lot of cool ideas into practice with .NET in a way that is simple and fun to use as a developer.

Sure, Microsoft is always trying to set itself up for greater success, but this doesn't always have to come at the expense of everyone else. (At least, I hope they are primarily greedy rather than predatorial ...although that is still a rather dismal hope.) MS seems to have got enough ducks in a row to be moving ahead so quickly and strongly that no other dev platform developers can keep up, especially the open source community. It seems that .NET is gaining the momentum to be the multi-platform desktop client (and now maybe rich web) that we always hoped Java would be. Even if the open source world is a few years behind on things like WPF/WCF, it still seems like an asset to have the multi-language .NET environment and GTK# / Windows Forms across Win/Linux/OSX, as well as standardization in the language.

The only nasty thing I see MS doing is trying to extract $$ from the open-source world based on patents/IP on the cross-platform stuff. MS has been burned on patents themselves, and with the growing mainstream angst against patents, the optimist in me perhaps naively hopes that the recent FUD cross-licensing tactics is as far as they will go, or will be able to go.

That aside, MS can't make us do anything we don't want to do. If Silverlight 2.0 is full of Windows-only stuff, web developers don't have to adopt it (they would be idiots to, if it meant reaching significantly less users), and continue to use SL 1.0 with SL 1.0 toolset. Perhaps .NET and SL 1.0 will even be a source of inspiration to the open source community to innovate forks?

My point is that sure, MS will likely have the best tools, and will be doing as much fancy stuff to bolster Windows as they can, but once .NET gets replicated in the open source world, we hopefully get to keep it for good, and get rid of issues like vendor lock-in and obsolesence (VB6 comes to mind). (Just beware the trojan horse of MS patents! If we all adopt .NET and build a thriving open-source cross-platform community around it and then MS successfully claims patent rights, goodbye world of free open-source! (.NET based OSS anyway))

I used to be a Linux freak, and went without Windows for about 4 years, and still have linux on my primary desktop, but I don't really mind anymore having Windows around in order to use MS's slick IDE, and maybe some of their MS Expression tools. I think the cross-platform-ness of the clients is much more important. Honestly, my hope right now is that Silverlight becomes as commonly deployed as Flash as quickly as possible, because I hate the idea of learning Flash-only languages and libraries and rewriting data structures and things in multiple languages in different environments (I am not a web developer and have yet to get into Flash, but after doing .NET at work for a few years, SL is looking mighty attractive assuming the users get it installed.)

Thoughts?