It was supposed to be a third-party replacement, sure, but certainly not an official one. It started as a student project. It's just the prefix that tricks your brain to associate it with MS's own .NET branded applications.
To be fair, the .NET brand is already super convoluted (there's .NET framework, the .NET core, .NET runtime, the .NET desktop runtime, the .NET sdk, and I'm genuinely not even sure which if any of these might refer to the same thing), on top of it weirdly sounding like something internet related to a casual user.
To be fair, the .NET brand is already super convoluted (there's .NET framework, the .NET core, .NET runtime, the .NET desktop runtime, the .NET sdk, and I'm genuinely not even sure which if any of these might refer to the same thing), on top of it weirdly sounding like something internet related to a casual user.