"THE more things change, the more they stay the same," claims one of our readers, who prefers to remain anonymous. "Got .Nessus in your country's infrastructure?" is the question he asks when suggesting that Microsoft is trying to poison the GNU/Linux operating system so as to gain more control over it because Free software takes over at the expense of Microsoft.

YESTERDAY we wrote about Moonlight and Mono-based applications getting more tightly integrated. We now see it confirmed by Novell employees Miguel de Icaza and Jonathan Pobst [1 2], so our suspicions were correct from the very start.

THINGS are starting to heat up, which means we must have hit some sensitive spot/s. Is it the list of Microsoft AstroTurfers? Or is it Microsoft Moonlight?

The question of using applications that are dependent on Mono has been a vexatious one for a long time. Nobody in the FOSS community has ever raised an objection to the provision of the packages by any GNU/Linux distribution; it's only the question of making these applications a part of the default set that has resulted in endless arguments.

I love zeal. Zeal is enthusiasm, it's zest, it's drive, it's initiative. Zeal builds communities. Unfortunately, in some individuals, zeal turns to zealotry, and zealotry does just the opposite. This a long posting, but it provides an excellent example of what I'm talking about, and I hope you'll take the time to read it.

Debian, the foundation of Ubuntu, has rejected claims that it is potentially holding Linux's future hostage to Microsoft by including an open-source implementation of .NET in its code.

Nothing of practical use has really changed for Mono, but its connection to Microsoft was made a lot clearer

...or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Look at the Wookie. Misdirection is a curious thing, and in the hands of Microsoft "evangelists" (such as Miguel de Icaza), it's positively dangerous.