Microsoft is doing great things with C# and .NET but I feel like the OSS community is struggling with its culture and identity a bit. There has been a lot of rug pulling by some of the most popular open source packages in the .NET world in recent years.

First it was Identity Server, which Microsoft even recommend using in the official documentation (or at least did a year ago), which went closed source and switched names. Then there were others like MediatR and MassTransit who recently went commercial. And now, most recently, several packages are leaning into the "Open Source Maintenance Fee" model which is technically still open source but problematic for any who updates their nuget dependencies without reading all the documents included in the package. I think it hurts extra much because in many of these cases they were very much embraced not only by the community but also by Microsoft just like Identity Server. Like Polly is actually used as a dependency by official Microsoft packages after Microsoft decided to embrace it rather than replace it with their own implementation. Similarly MassTransit and other similar projects objected loudly a few years back when Microsoft were proposing their own messaging/eventing framework and Microsoft backed off.

I'm not saying that OSS maintainers and projects don't deserve to get paid, but none of these projects would have become nearly as popular had they started out commercial. And I feel like this type of thing is happening a lot more in the .NET community recently than in others (although I will concede that I am not as involved in others). Perhaps it is the fact that Microsoft as a big enterprise entity is very much in the driver's seat of the stack or the fact that it is used in a lot of enterprise software or just cultural baggage from 20 years ago where you paid for every library. In any case it feels like there is quite an Enterprise-y sentiment within the entire .NET community. Unfortunately.