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> So who is?

Linus Torvalds, RMS, Guido van Rossum, and a very long list of other open source contributors who were writing open source code before it was 'hip' or good PR.

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Those guys do (did) some great things. However, I wasn't asking about who was a cool developer or great OSS personality (Or a crazy person or obnoxius mailing list asshat for that matter :) )

I meant, when it comes to choosing a platform/language/IDE for enterprise dev or mobile/cloud dev, there are lots of options but most of the "big" ones also come from megacorps (Oracle, Google...)

What scared people most about .NET is usually the closed nature (will they continue to develop it? will they charge more tomorrow?) and the fact that it only runs on windows which makes it more expensive. When it's open sourced and available for other platforms, it's no worse than the alternatives in that respect.

I think people didn't trust MS because of Android patent extortion fees (which they still do BTW) and Mono was covered only partially by patent promise. I still don't know if every part of Mono is "patent promise" covered (by MS).

I don't believe MS would sue some random ISV but let's assume Google today forks Mono - will this be safe for them to use ?

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