To most people, Mono is a disease that leaves young people tired and listless. But to members of the free software community, Mono is something worse: a controversy that leaves everybody over-wrought and mistrusting each other.

When you think mono, you think tired. You think sleepy. You think shut-yourself-up-in-your-bedroom-for-two-weeks-and-snooze-like-Rip-Van-Winkle. You get the idea. But that is not how it should be. Mono isn’t boring. Mono should excite people!

There has been a lot of pro-Mono and anti-Mono arguments assaulting the community of late. The debate is not new but both sides have taken up arms since some distributions have decided to either remove Mono or include Mono by default.

We've all heard the rants: Mono has patents, Microsoft releases community promise, community ignores, flamewars continue. Enough to make any developer want to stop programming out of sheer annoyance. Mono is an excellent language and platform; there's nothing anybody can do to change that. People will continue to develop C# apps, and those that continue to hate Mono will continue to complain.

Many a vigorous debate has been fought over any possible legal threats that might be inherent in Mono. Now that Microsoft has extended its Community Promise to cover select parts of the C# programming language, which is what Mono is built on, it is being hailed as evidence that Mono is safe. Bruce Byfield tries to answer the question, is it really?

gNewSense is shifting to Debian codebase, shafting Mono, and the debate about Mono and Moonlight reaches new levels

Suppression of constructive debate about the problems with Novell's Mono

I keep seeing posts on Identi.ca (and elsewhere) from people looking for alternatives to *really really** good applications like Gnome-do and Banshee just because they are written in C#/Mono.

There has been a wide range of discussion on the subject of Mono and its inclusion in Ubuntu by default. Some people believe that Mono may infringe on Microsoft patents while others believe that it is useful to include. Personally, I have no idea about whether Mono does infringe on Microsoft patents, but I see other reasons why Ubuntu should remove it.