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).

"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..."

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)

Miguel de Icaza on KDE and Mono .

Miguel de Icaza confirms Novell's plans to bring Mono to Google's Android

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?

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

Another explanation of the Mono problem; Miguel de Icaza makes Windows software

OK, I'm conflicted. Last Saturday at the Software Freedom Day event in Boston, Richard Stallman called Miguel de Icaza “a traitor to the Free Software community" because of de Icaza's involvement with Microsoft-based technologies like Mono and Moonlight.