Summary: While some GNU/Linux projects are cleaning themselves up by removing Mono, Novell employees work on inserting Mono into other fine projects

Thanks to Groklaw for the headsup on this one. Fedora 13 was officially released several days ago and in the release notes one can find the following changes for desktop users:

4.1.7. Shotwell replaces Gthumb and F-Spot as default photo organizer Shotwell is a free and open source photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment and has replaced Gthumb and F-Spot by default in Fedora 13. It supports the following features:

* import photos from any digital camera supported by gPhoto * automatically organize events containing photos taken at the same time * use tags to organize your photo collection * edit non-destructively when altering photos, without ruining originals or using disk space for each copy * publish photos to Facebook, Flickr or Picasa * one-click auto-enhancement * rotate, mirror, and crop photos * reduce red-eye and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of your photos * edit any photo, even if it's not imported to the Shotwell library

For more information about Shotwell, refer to http://yorba.org/shotwell/. Gthumb and F-Spot continue to be maintained and available in the Fedora repository. They are not installed by default anymore.

Canonical did the same thing in Ubuntu 10.10, possibly in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 as well.

At Groklaw this is summarised as "Shotwell Replaces Gthumb and F-Spot as Photo Organizer in Fedora 13" and Pamela Jones adds that "Shotwell is written in Vala.

"And here's one prominent reason developers do not want to rely on C#," Jones adds, pointing to the FSF's epic statement from last year.

Groklaw also writes about MeeGo's Mono problem which we covered in recent days [1, 2]. Jones cites this article from Brian Proffitt, adding that it's "Mono, Mono, Mono."

Audio playback is quick, too, and I thought the video playback was excellent, thanks to the Banshee application.

Banshee is very clearly outside the scope of the MCP. Therefore, it is an open invitation for one to be sued or at least extorted by Microsoft. Not that Novell employees would care. They get a paycheck. ⬆

"I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue"

--Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist