Nonsense. :)

Unity has really driven home the popularity of Mono as a cross-platform code platform -- there are tons of people using it who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves .NET programmers. (yes, I realize there's a mix of library, language, and APIs in that soup).

But Mono merging with real .NET crossplatform support suddenly makes it a viable api for all sorts of non-microsoft use.

Back in the day, I remember how badly I wanted the dataset controls from .NET -- they have all this nice built-in functionality manage partial datasets from MSSQL to client memory and then sync multi-edits back to the database again (round trip). It's possibly the best round-trip data controls I've ever found in a library and it's mostly unheard of outside .NET circles. It makes the libraries that jQuery and Rails use

We have a lot to learn from each other -- I'm glad that MS has taken this step forward to embrace cross-platform again in such an open way.

That's my feeling as well. No amount of opening stuff can fix their reputation at this stage. Unless they'll completely drop all their crooked practices, which is not likely.

What company is not opportunistic? They are by definition.