Okay this Mono thing is getting hot. Really hot.

You would think that anyone in the FOSS community would stay away from anything Microsoft, but it seems there are more Miguel Icazas out there than we’d like to think. There are groups of people in Ubuntu and other distros that want to make Mono a default when installing a distro. Many distros already install Mono by default. If you have Tomboy Notes on your Linux system, you have Mono.

Some are saying that Microsoft in conjunction with Novell is trying to push this into Linux distros (via programmers) as a patent boobytrap to be used later by Microsoft to crush Linux. As Richard Stallman puts it:

“The patent danger to Mono comes from patents we know Microsoft has, on libraries which are outside the C# spec and thus not covered by any promise not to sue. In effect, Microsoft has designed in boobytraps for us.

“Indeed, every large program implements lots of ideas that are patented. Indeed, there’s no way to avoid this danger. But that’s no reason to put our head inside Microsoft’s jaws.”

–Richard Stallman

I don’t use Tomboy or any other app that uses Mono.If you want to find out if you have Mono on your system, go to the command line and type:  which mono

It will probably be in someplace like usr/bin/mono.

To get a better idea what is going on with this Mono battle and Microsoft/Novell misdeeds, go to Boycott Novell .