I have to agree. Even Gnome developers described the thing as "putting our balls in Redmond's hands": http://lu.is/blog/index.cgi/531.html http://lu.is/blog/ind

I have to agree. Even Gnome developers described the thing as "putting our balls in Redmond's hands": http://lu.is/blog/index.cgi/531.html http://lu.is/blog/index.cgi/531.html. In fact the mono patent situation remained unclear for years, until 2009 if I remember correctly. And in 2006 there was the whole Novell-Microsoft kerfuffle, with Ballmer saying that only Suse Linux users were not violating Microsoft intellectual property http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2006/11/16/ballmer-on-novell-linux-and-patents/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2006/11/16/ballmer-on-no.... So I really would not call the reaction FUD. Also, adding my personal experience from that period, I'd say that many Linux desktop users, myself included, were not interested in adding mono as another dependency to the stack, especially to run three applications: a note-taking application (tomboy), photo management (f-spot) or the banshee music player(which, I'm sorry to say, was one of the most crash-happy pieces of gnome). Samba and ffmpeg (well, the patented parts thereof) were never meant to be building blocks on which to write a lot free software, they are ways to ensure compatibility with existing closed solutions. I have some simpathy for de Icaza's idea that, since C# is a nice programming language, people should be encouraged and helped to use it, but the combination of patents' threat and frankly the "let's just put it in gnome!" approach doomed the effort. Also, in hindsight, mono would have (has?) worked better in the entreprise sector, rather than in desktop environment (Ruby is about as open as it gets, but it is not used for DE's stuff, execpt YAST2 I think). Hopefully now that most of the dotnet stack is open (except the bits that do depend on windows e.g. WindowsForm, if I'm not mistaken) we'll see a rebirth of interest.