> I suspect the reason he dislikes it, as many seem to, is that it's potentially legally unstable as Microsoft own IP related to C# and .net. This has been on

> I suspect the reason he dislikes it, as many seem to, is that it's potentially legally unstable as Microsoft own IP related to C# and .net. This has been on the horizon ever since Mono's inception. This is what wikipedia has to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Mono_and_Microsoft.27s_patents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Mono_and_Micros... On July 6, 2009, Microsoft announced that it was placing their ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specifications under their Community Promise pledging that they would not assert their patents against anyone implementing, distributing, or using alternative implementations of .NET.[79] However, their position regarding the non-ECMA components like ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows Forms (which are the bone of contention) remains unclarified. There are concerns regarding MS community promise, and of course about the components which remain unclarified. If it ever goes to court, it will be a battle similar to Google vs Oracle over Java. MS might create trouble, but when that happens, that isn't going to be easy. Even considering that, how is Mono intrinsically evil? When MS sues, hindsight will say Mono team was misguided and naive to trust MS, but that still doesn't make mono evil.