"The Gnome desktop environment developers have recently taken the decision to reengineer the Gnome desktop around the Mono framework. This decision has mainly been influenced by the main Mono developer Miguel de Icaza, who is a very vocal employee of Novell..."

Does GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's backflip over the Novell-Microsoft deal a few days ago mean that he has finally been convinced that he is on a one-way path to nowhere?

Miguel de Icaza: "We could refresh the look and feel of the entire desktop with Moonlight"

Translation: We'll try to make the whole desktop dependent on a MS standard.

An article that quotes rather damning material about Mono suddenly vanishes without a trace and Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza still attacks critics of patents around Mono (which he himself implicitly criticised in the now-vanished article)

At the turn of this decade Miguel de Icaza was the unblemished hero of the free software movement and chief architect and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the GNOME project, which had come into being as the free software response to KDE. Now de Icaza is regarded with suspicion because of his support for Mono. What happened to bring about this change?

An illustration of the evolution of GNOME under Novell's watch .

Dear Miguel: During the last couple of weeks there has been a tremendous amount of information pouring about Mono, the free (speechwise) implementation of .NET started by you, Novell's vice-president of Development Platform, and how it should/would be handled by distros. We even had RMS himself come into the fray and tell us his take on it (which he had been mum about till now).

Miguel de Icaza on KDE and Mono .

More perspectives arrive in response to a technical/legal analysis of Moonlight and Miguel de Icaza's highly-deserved Microsoft MVP award