Following up on my reply, this post by the author of the language (on an unrelated forum) might illuminate the issue you were concerned with:
"Hi,
I'm the author of the Cobra programming language. I didn't write the
statement about it being intrinsically bound up in the .NET framework.
In fact, I'm the guy who started two additional back-ends for JVM and
Objective-C, as well as the refactoring necessary to support this.
These are not complete, and I would love any and all help with these
efforts. If you're interested, let me know. (Cobra is open source
under the liberal MIT license.)
In the mean time, Cobra runs on Novell Mono (which I use on Mac and
Linux) and Microsoft .NET.
You can learn more about Cobra at http://cobra-language.com/
-Chuck "
Hosting on .NET has given the author access to some very useful facilities. A VM that understands generics, with two major independent implementations, and a large ecosystem of code and tools.
But for many open source programmers, anything to do with Microsoft, even at arm's length, is seen as suspect. This is a cultural memory that can't easily be erased.
Hence my original remark: good language, but it will struggle to gain traction.
My (vague) guess would be that with the existence of Mono, which essentially gives something like this a universality, whomever down voted you thought you might have been MS bashing.
But yeah, I don't think your comment was out of line.
edit: out of genuine curiousity, why the downvote?