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I said the languages "weren't open-source". The only reasonable interpretation of whether a language "is" open-source is whether it has first-class open-source implementations and tooling. Otherwise we'd say things like "Windows is open-source" because ReactOS exists.


Putting Mono in the same category as ReactOS is disingenuous at best. Mono was such a good open source implementation that Microsoft eventually bought company behind it and canonized it (Xamarin).


My experience was that you couldn't take a random C# project and run it on Mono and expect it to work. I don't want to diminish the technical effort that went into Mono, but it would be misleading to say that open-source C# worked without further qualifications.


Kind of like it would be misleading to say that most popular programming languages were not open source until recently.


I don't think it is. What does it mean for a language to be open-source, if not that there are one or more open-source implementations of that language which support most or all of the extant ecosystem for that language.


Go look at the TIOBE index ten years ago: https://www.geeks3d.com/20110121/tiobe-index-january-2011-py...

Top 5 languages were Java, C, C++, PHP, Python. All five of them were open source in mainstream implementations (Open JDK, GCC, GCC, PHP mainline, Python mainline).




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