These last ten years I was really enjoying what Microsoft and its .NET teams were doing. Felt like a good community to be a part of. Huge strides to make things run anywhere and be more involved with the open source community.
While that hasn't necessarily gone away, jamming LLM's into everything is leaving a real sour taste. Pointless copilot button anywhere and everywhere. VS and VSCode pushing the GitHub copilot chats and agents.
We are quickly back to the corporate MSFT that doesn't listen to its users or employees. All that good will has been washed away and now I feel the need to switch off of Windows.
Dotnet is maintained by the .NET Foundation and is entirely open source. There are thousands of forks and local clones of the repos under that organization. Rather than hoping someone does this, it'd actually be a huge benefit to everyone for you to create a local clone of the repo and update it now and then, assuming you're worried it might go down anyway.
DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1, though it's lame that it's an opt-out and not opt-in. The CLI does give a fat warning on first use at least (which hilariously spams CI output). Opt-in would be so much better though, and opt-out by default is really not great.You can specify other package sources as well, so nothing technically stops someone from making their own alternative. That being said, you'd have to configure it for each project/solution that wants to use that registry.
The main thing I'd be worried about here is nuget.org getting pulled. As far as I can tell, it's run by MS, not the foundation. That'd be basically the entire ecosystem gone all at once. Fortunately, it's actually super easy to create private registries that mirror packages on nuget.org, and it's actually standard practice to do this at many companies. This means that at the very least it would be possible to recover some of the registry if this happened.
For a fork, I would think these would be the main goals I'd look for: