Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.

In response to the open letter written by free software guru Richard Stallman about the Mono problem, Alexander Schmehl, Debian developer and spokesperson for the GNU/Linux distribution has pointed out that Debian has no plans to include the controversial programming environment in the default GNOME installation.

Just have a look at what will be gnome 3.0...here is it.. And along with the controversy found with Mono. Richard Stallman, a member of the GNOME Foundation, has said that GNOME 3.0 will include more applications made with Mono: "The only application that Mono is now part of the whole launch is Tomboy

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.

Jeremy Allison from the Samba team argues that Mono and applications that depend on Mono should be put in "restricted" repositories

OK, I'm conflicted. Last Saturday at the Software Freedom Day event in Boston, Richard Stallman called Miguel de Icaza “a traitor to the Free Software community" because of de Icaza's involvement with Microsoft-based technologies like Mono and Moonlight.

YESTERDAY we showed that Richard Stallman does not support .NET/Mono in GNU/Linux, not by default anyway. The following is an adaptation of Jose's comment, which he wanted us to share here. It nicely relates to something that we saw a couple of weeks ago.

The introduction of Mono into Linux and the open source environment begs risking patent claims from Microsoft. Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman sees it that way. The Technical board at Ubuntu, on the other hand, doesn't consider it any reason to be disturbed.

Canonical's Gerry Carr said that Ubuntu was not deliberately looking for Mono-based applications nor is it excluding them. The Canonical Board has yet to make a policy decision on Mono. He said that there will be one more piece of Mono based software called Banshee in 9.10. Banshee is an audio player and might replace Rhythmbox.