Spring was born from a book on application design written by an expert on the subject. MVC .Net was probably the result of the sort of R & D that companies like Microsoft can afford to do and do well.
IIRC ASP.Net MVC had folks from Castle Project's (of Dynamic Proxy fame, extensively used by NHibernate) ActiveRecord+MonoRail framework working on it, which was itself (as it can be guessed) heavily inspired by Ruby on Rails.