As regards your last sentence, MS licensing does definitely limit your ability to scale out (over multiple servers, see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001279.html). Mono might just save MS from losing the server mindshare entirely if it can talk itself into letting go of the license more than even the community "promise."
I have been pleasantly surprised to find C#/.NET is quite good. Please do force MS' hand by supporting the alternatives. The more good alternatives there are to .NET including improvements to Java, Scala or what have you, the more likely MS will do the smart long-term thing and loosen its licensing restrictions.
(please do say why you might disagree - I'm genuinely curious)
They have completely misunderstood what Markus is trying to do there. He wants a big box so he can do big joins because what he cares about is being able to match people across arbitrary criteria not, at sharding fanboys would do, separating them into separate pools by surname or a hashing function and then you never meet your perfect match because her records are in a different shard to yours... A modern romcom could be written about that.
I have been pleasantly surprised to find C#/.NET is quite good. Please do force MS' hand by supporting the alternatives. The more good alternatives there are to .NET including improvements to Java, Scala or what have you, the more likely MS will do the smart long-term thing and loosen its licensing restrictions.
(please do say why you might disagree - I'm genuinely curious)