Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, a Debian developer who stated Debian's position on Mono in the default Debian install last week, has clarified his statement on the issue in a new posting.

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.

by Richard M. Stallman
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.

The Debian GNU/Linux distribution may include Mono in its default install, with the project leader Steve McIntyre telling iTWire today that "there's a chance that it might do, but it's under discussion at the moment."

We have received some mail recently from developers who are concerned about issues that are covered here, including OOXML and Mono. One person, for example, was concerned about pressure on KDE to implement support for OOXML (a big no-no). Coming from Debian, a concerned developer spoke about the problems surrounding Mono. Together, we ought to at least try to inform.

I've stayed fairly quiet on the controversy over Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET protocol and C# programming language that's been grabbing a greater share of the desktop in various Linux distributions in recent years and months. ...

The question of using applications that are dependent on Mono has been a vexatious one for a long time. Nobody in the FOSS community has ever raised an objection to the provision of the packages by any GNU/Linux distribution; it's only the question of making these applications a part of the default set that has resulted in endless arguments.

The Debian project appears to be cleaning itself off of Mono.

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