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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.