EDIT: Softened the language a bit.
Scott Hanselman made what I thought was, even in jest, a statement that didn't quite feel right to me. Mr. Hanselman, a newly minted employee of the company that brought us MSBuild and MSTest but forgot to clone CC.NET while they were at it, says that he thought the conference could have been called the "Not Invented Here" (NIH) conference. The same company that on pain of death refuses to use design pattern terminology from outside of Redmond. I'm guessing he said that because of our almost willful usage of so many tools from outside of Redmond. I'd say that one of the most encouraging things about ALT.NET and the ALT.NET conference was the openess to ideas coming from outside of Redmond. One of the very best tenets from David's original post is the openness to other communities. Heck, you could arguably call ALT.NET the "Fast Follower" group.
One of the best things about ScottGu's MVC framework presentation from my perspective was how much they had obviously researched other platforms. Several times ScottGu alluded to design choices inspired by other MVC frameworks like Rails or Django or a couple other frameworks I hadn't even heard of. Several, several references were made to MonoRail. They didn't try to make everything up themselves. They went out and took the best stuff from other platforms while trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of the existing frameworks. They used common names for design patterns when appropriate (it's a huge pet peeve of mine that Microsoft creates new nomeclature for commonly used terms or patterns). They were part of the greater software community! This wasn't the "Not Invented Here" conference. This was .Net's "Not Invented Here Exorcism!"
I am still cranky about Microsoft's relationship with Open Source tooling, but I blame the lawyers more than anyone else.
Hanselman, dude, you had some of the best one liners in the conference, but you lose points for looking way too happy with yourself after your pre-canned zingers.