Summary: Novell's failure to make a return and the issue of Mono revisited

LAST week we wrote about Novell's terrible financial results (losses of over $200,000,000), citing in part Matt Asay, who used to serve Novell as an employee. In his blog, the following comment has since then appeared:

Matt,

You worked at Novell and so did I. How can you believe that the geniuses in charge of product marketing at Novell can create anything around Intelligent Workload Management? Novell has pieces of management tools all over the place. Some of them run on Linux, some run on Windows, some, even run on both Linux and Windows. Novell has failed in data center management, virtualization software, etc. There is no way that this "New" idea will lead Novell out of the mess that the company is in.

Another comment makes it clear that Mono takes some of the blame because it drives the most valuable people away:

NO novell here, not allowed!

NO SLES!

NO opensuse!

Why?

Mono!

Miguel de Icaza!

Deal with the devil incarnate, ms!

NOPE, NO THANKS!

Used to be a big fan of Suse, till novell came into the picture.

Unauthorized vendor : NOVEL.

There are other interesting comments in there. And as we showed a couple of days ago, GNOME is now at risk of losing Its GNU status. Mono did not help and here is another post on the subject:

The whole issue started after a message from Lucas Rocha regarding Code of Conduct and Foundation Member Membership for Planet GNOME. Mandriva’s Frederic Crozat brought up the issue of people, who have drifted away from the GNOME project, being still present in Planet GNOME.

This was actually not initiated by the Mono controversy, but nonetheless, says Shaun McCance, "Dear Lefty, Please stop. You're hurting !Gnome..."

Elsewhere, in Kubuntu Forums, it seems like Mono proponents have not planted a flag yet (unlike Ubuntu Forums).

GreyGeek on the Kubuntu Forums has written up an excellent point by point rebuttal to a lot of common Mono claims. There is a growing discussion about this hot topic on the forums as well (linked below). Are Microsoft Astroturfers everywhere? Or is this love for Microsoft blind?

It is important to keep the KDE 'zone' free of Mono. Microsoft has made it clear already that it's a trap. It's not a trap for Novell customers (not until the end of 2011), but for others it should be a no-go area. ⬆