Comment by ChuckMcM

This is great. There is a really interesting lesson/insight here. Programmers are expensive.

There are a number of things people are doing, based on Linux, which are basically using Linux as an OS and then layering on some custom drivers or such into a product. Whether its a web 2.0 company using it as the server OS or an embedded signage company. All of these were "impossible" when you had to have your own OS team to support them, and Microsoft benefited from that. Now the OS "maintains itself" (such as it is) and so businesses get everything they got from employing Microsoft tools but at a much lower effective cost. They don't need to pay big license fees, they don't need to hire programmers to maintain a lot of code that isn't central to their product, and they don't have to spend a lot of money/time training people on their own infrastructure. That is a pretty big change.

Its nice to see folks realize it isn't the software that is valuable, its the expertise to use it that has value. By open sourcing the C# compiler Microsoft greatly increases the number of people who will develop expertise in using it and that will most likely result in an increase of use.