Summary: Buy your improved Mono solutions from Novell now!

LAST week Novell made this quiet announcement:

Novell has released a new product based on Mono 2.4, the SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension, which provides commercial support for running .NET applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

As seller points out, "the first example of Commercial or Open Source is... Microsoft SQL Server!" There is also VistaDB in there. Why was the press not covering this? This seems like a dodgy business model for Novell, which goes out of its way to spread Mono in competing GNU/Linux distributions.

Mono and "Microsoft Moonlight" (that's what Novell and Microsoft call it now) are nothing but trouble. Beranger did the right thing and we've started compiling a list of Mono applications and their recommended replacements.

Yesterday we explained that Microsoft is hoping to ease the migration from GNU/Linux to Windows using all this work (some from Novell). Paula Rooney wrote some more about it and her colleague Dana Blankenhorn added:

I was reminded of this reading Mary Jo Foley’s piece on Microsoft financing an open source version of NFS4 for Windows. The software will let Windows clients easily transfer data from Linux servers. It is of enormous benefit to the Windows community.

What a wonderful transition this whole "interoperability" provision is preparing. If only it worked the other way.

As a side note, reminds us one reader: "It might be worth finding out how Novell is dealing with apparent EOL of its main product [Netware]. Is it staying open source and steering its former customers to Samba, or is it simply yet another sales front for Microsoft?"

Any ideas?

"Samba is in some cases a drop-in replacement for Netware or Windows Server," reminds us the reader. ⬆

"There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers."

--Bob Muglia, Microsoft President