(the viability of the Microsoft developer ecosystem, despite its' attempts to clamber onto the open source bandwagon, will continue to degrade thanks to free market economics, zero-cost-of-copy, and the fact that the FOSS community eventually fills any technology gaps that appear. Many within that ecosystem will continue to deny this, and they have a few more years -- perhaps a decade -- or so where that will be a workable strategy)
The open source .NET ecosystem - and hopefully Microsoft supporting that - does have a continued place as long as it can remain relevant to the technology audience. The .NET framework has pushed plenty of boundaries in programming language research, features and functionality, for example.
What I should have focused on is the sense that I picked up from the article that free is somehow bad, and that it's justified to punish and deride people who have a (in my view, reasonable) expectation of free and open source software. It is self-evidently true that we can and do make and distribute all kinds of free and open source software at no cost.
The tendency to belittle people for expecting zero cost appears as a result, I think, of a kind of gaslighting and stockholm syndrome where people in the ecosystem have _expected_ to have to pay large amounts for software that is in many ways no better than FOSS alternatives - especially as time continues on, resulting in convergence of defect analysis, fixes, and features in popular FOSS projects.
That's a background that skews towards corporate and first-world experiences, and it's not (I don't think) aligned with the expectations of the next few generations of developers worldwide.
What .NET and other popular technologies - proprietary or otherwise - will do for those future generations is shape their ideas and visions about what technology is capable of. And I hope everyone would want that to be as optimistic as possible.
But if a thousand people receive a free (perhaps sugar-addled) lunch from one of a few providers -- while collectively having the resources to feed each other free lunches (more sustainably, long-term) -- it doesn't seem fair to attack and blame those people for asking difficult questions about their food source. Even if they might seem entitled today, they're asking questions that will probably appear more than fair in retrospect.
(I realize these analogies don't fit perfectly, and I'm aware I'm reframing the issue, perhaps awkwardly)
With software, fortunately, it may be business critical, but it's rarely personal-health critical the way that nutrition is (unless, perhaps, we have already incorporated infrastructure too deeply into ourselves as humans).
If a market entrant wants to get an edge on existing incumbents, they will look for opportunities to operate at lower costs.
If a non-free component can be rewritten and redistributed at a lower cost, then eventually it will be, either to improve margins or by a market entrant.
This is why I expect that the article's proposition that the marketplace should expect to pay for a component will crumble over time.
is .NET paid somehow?
could it be cheaper? maybe in terms of hardware, but overall?
(you also make a very observant hint: total cost of ownership includes hardware-level resource provisioning)