Banshee is going to be the default music player for Ubuntu which makes me worry. Banshee is based on the controversial Mono technologies developed by Novell employees. Richard M Stallman has warned against Mono and C# which applies to Banshee as well.

Insertion of Mono-based software like Banshee endangers Ubuntu as it makes the parent company more reliant on Microsoft and more sensitive to Microsoft extortion

A bizarre decision is made just weeks before the final release of Ubuntu 10.04 because an F-Spot (Mono) competitor is removed and Banshee (Mono) gains integration with Ubuntu One
Steven Rosenberg has just published a rave (finally!) about Ubuntu 10.04. He particularly likes gThumb, which can help remove Mono from Ubuntu.

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).

Refutation of Mono disinformation about Banshee being a GNOME project without associated issues

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.

AFTER persistently ignoring those who warned about Mono, Canonical finally follows Fedora's (Red Hat's) footsteps and takes a closer look at the Mono licensing question. Here is a new statement...

Progress on the argument for GNU/Linux without Mono as a dependency

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.