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.

A recent ComputerWorld article titled "Windows 7: The Linux Killer" has been getting a lot of attention. The article basically argues that Microsoft's vulnerability to Linux comes entirely from netbooks and that Windows 7 is designed to and will take over the netbook market. On one point I agree, on one point I disagree, and on one point I think we just have to wait and see.

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.

While some GNU/Linux projects are cleaning themselves up by removing Mono, Novell employees work on inserting Mono into other fine projects

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

Before I begin this essay, I would like to go ahead and pre-empt any attempts to make me out like I’m a Mono shill. I’m far from it. The only application that uses Mono that I found remotely useful was F-Spot. I see no point in running Tomboy when I can just use Gedit (since files are opened in multiple tabs, just like EditPad).

Jo Shields writes well and this is a well written piece that articulates the position of a software developer who clearly likes what Mono has to offer. What strikes me with these posts is how technical and abstract the position of the developer is.

Those who dislike Mono to the extent that, they would like to avoid mono based software as best as they can, are getting larger everyday. But when you install a software you never know if it contains Mono or not. That is where Mononono(sounds real funny, eh?) comes in. Mononono creates an intentional conflict with mono packages and thus making it easy.