I was calling oracle and microsoft the alligator and crocodile for reference. The technology is good on both sides.
The steer and the intention is dubious however. I have also used Java extensively, back when it popped up on Solaris for ref. The difficulty is that the platform will always have priority development on the business interests of the hour and that overlaps with saleable things. Microsoft are only doing this "for free" because they are still objectively making a shit ton of money out of subscription services (Azure / O365) and they know the rest of the market is dead. So this is now a gateway to using those services effectively. It's a clever bit of planning and I respect them for that. But at the same time I've been burned so many times now with random direction changes and deprecations that I can't put my trust in it or logically risk building a new product on their platform.
You can't fork them realistically. That's not possible. Well you can but there will be no traction unless you take the entire community with you.
If they get too shady, especially Oracle, the Java community is way bigger than Oracle itself. I'm pretty sure that a Java fork would be successful, if push comes to shove.
The .NET community is much smaller so at this point it wouldn't work. But the way they are going, in a few years it should be doable.
You obviously won't be able to fork as a solo contributor, but if it's that bad, you won't go at it alone.
The steer and the intention is dubious however. I have also used Java extensively, back when it popped up on Solaris for ref. The difficulty is that the platform will always have priority development on the business interests of the hour and that overlaps with saleable things. Microsoft are only doing this "for free" because they are still objectively making a shit ton of money out of subscription services (Azure / O365) and they know the rest of the market is dead. So this is now a gateway to using those services effectively. It's a clever bit of planning and I respect them for that. But at the same time I've been burned so many times now with random direction changes and deprecations that I can't put my trust in it or logically risk building a new product on their platform.
You can't fork them realistically. That's not possible. Well you can but there will be no traction unless you take the entire community with you.