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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
I was going over an old Groklaw posting that got me thinking about Microsoft and it’s .NET Agenda. I decided to do more research and took a look at the Comes vs Microsoft documents again but from the perspective of the current Mono issues. I am even more convinced that Mono and Moonlight do nothing but help Microsoft win against competing platforms.
In short, we are in an adversarial situation. Microsoft does not want us to succeed. Thus we cannot trust Microsoft, even if we'd like to, and must consider Mono based upon the question "What is the worst thing MS can reasonably do?". We can only trust Mono if we are convinced Microsoft doesn't have weasel room. The current situation appears, to me, to have lots of weasel room.
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...
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.
