Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it's safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

The Free Software Foundation has issued another statement on Mono, C# after the recent Microsoft extension of the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of ECMA 334 and 335. Is is safe to go back in the water now, as so many have been saying? FSF says no, that the "promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe."

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?

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.

Thank you, Microsoft. No, really. Thank you. Ignore the spin from Mono/Novell blogs and think what Microsoft has just formally acknowledged, even implicitly. To reuse a belated response sent to some journalists (it was hard to reply while absent), the gist goes like this...

FSF: Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it's safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

Now that Microsoft formally recognises the contribution of Miguel de Icaza to Microsoft, there is no longer any reason to think of Mono as beneficial to GNU/Linux

Infragistics adds its weight to Mono at times when Novell's future is mostly unknown and OpenSUSE rethinks its strategy

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.