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Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight. [...] For those readers who have a bias toward Mono, I understand.
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.
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.
Many a vigorous debate has been fought over any possible legal threats that might be inherent in Mono. Now that Microsoft has extended its Community Promise to cover select parts of the C# programming language, which is what Mono is built on, it is being hailed as evidence that Mono is safe. Bruce Byfield tries to answer the question, is it really?
A reader believes that an application which promotes .NET/Mono might be marketed to GNU/Linux-using public some time in the future now that the GIMP is removed from Ubuntu, due to another Mono application
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.
