No indeed, quite a lot has been written in the early .NET days about the apparent disconnect between the touted cross-platformness and Microsoft’s behaviour which seemed to discourage the development of .NET ports to other OSs. However eventually Mono got off the ground in a successful way and right now the .NET project is actually open source. This has come as somewhat of a surprise to most (including me), but a pleasant one.
Subscription based software is probably the single most hated type of licensing available today. Nobody who is not obviously lying for marketing purposes is disputing that. It is also being adopted at an alarming rate and we’re just going to have to hope that the obvious effort to normalise this horror is weaker than the disgust it inspires.
However licensing has nothing to do with .NET as a programming platform. Or at least I fail to see the connection.
Have you seen the amount of plug-ins available for Grasshopper? How many of those do you think would have been written if C++ was the only available language? Developing in C# is vastly simpler than C++. Good IDEs and compilers are available for free, the same binaries can be executed on multiple operating systems (provided they do not rely on something which is specific to one of them), there is a huge amount of highly readable information on writing C# code, and with the open sourcing of .NET it has become less part of the Microsoft ecosystem.
I’m sure I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2038.