The ECMA process requires that all patents held by member companies that are essential for implementing its standards are available under "reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms" for the purpose of implementing those Standards. This is the normal condition used in all International Standards organizations, including both ECMA and ISO.

But Microsoft (and our co-sponsors, Intel and Hewlett-Packard) went further and have agreed that our patents essential to implementing C# and CLI will be available on a "royalty-free" and otherwise RAND" basis for this purpose.

Of course, this doesn't help with things like ASP.NET and ADO.NET, but I bet that open source alternatives could turn out to be as good as or better than these two, with the benefit of running both on a Windows CLR and a ECMA/Mono CLR. For proof of this, look at Java projects such as Velocity, Struts, WebWork, Hibernate and others. If you look at the rate at which open source Java stuff is getting ported to C#, I think that the .NET community recognizes this. Key insight: The good stuff doesn't have to (or even isn't likely to be) the stuff blessed by the platform vendor. If it's good enough people will still use it.

One of the reasons that I got involved with pyblosxom development was that I wanted to have a blogging platform that could be used to play with these kinds of ideas.