Canonical's route to escaping Microsoft's patent extortion is simple owing to gThumb and Gnote, but will it manage to see Mono's agenda?

Canonical's Gerry Carr said that Ubuntu was not deliberately looking for Mono-based applications nor is it excluding them. The Canonical Board has yet to make a policy decision on Mono. He said that there will be one more piece of Mono based software called Banshee in 9.10. Banshee is an audio player and might replace Rhythmbox.

Mono has a potentially fatal sting-in-the-tail for some, and leaves a rather nasty taste in the mouths of many others… So, I thought I’d see what happened if I removed Mono from Ubuntu.

There has been a wide range of discussion on the subject of Mono and its inclusion in Ubuntu by default. Some people believe that Mono may infringe on Microsoft patents while others believe that it is useful to include. Personally, I have no idea about whether Mono does infringe on Microsoft patents, but I see other reasons why Ubuntu should remove it.

Mono loses ground as it gets increasingly removed and Ubuntu should follow suit (regarding Mono inclusion), argue some of its own users

Mono lock-in potentially increased due to Novell's Banshee in Ubuntu GNU/Linux

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.

Constructive suggestions for Canonical to save disk space and also remove a controversial dependency that slows Ubuntu down

F-Spot is an almost complete photo management application but has a problem (according to many people): it uses MONO. An advantage over similar tools like gThumb is the option to upload to PicasaWeb or Flickr. For the stable version of gThumb (2.10) that is, because the latest development version of gThumb (2.11.x) has already gained PicasaWeb support (not Flickr support for now though)!