Summary: Microsoft is drilling a legal loophole into Ubuntu GNU/Linux and apathy still serves Microsoft's plan

ONE important bug that Canonical no longer tries to squash is the Mono bug. It adds a liability which everyone is well aware of, including the company's outgoing CTO (Canonical reorganised following some important departures at the top)..

The host of TechBytes, Tim, is usually very moderate, but he too is still concerned about Mono inside Ubuntu. The other day he wrote in Diaspora: "I've much love for Ubuntu and whilst it's not my desktop choice now, it's certainly the one I will recommend to others. The community is great, the distro is great.

"It does though always sadden me when we see Canonical's insistence to stick with Banshee and ergo Mono. Why?

"Of course removing Mono is not the problem, I just merely wish they would get over this particular dependency that I cannot see has any benefits (even if you don't buy into a patent trap scenario)"

One of our contributors has already added a wiki page about removing Mono from the latest Ubuntu and Phoronix writes about Mono and Banshee in a new article which Tim called "a rather interesting read."

Later he wrote: "I commented on TechBytes some time ago about its sluggishness and it's interesting to see that its still being commented on now. Patent trap or not, we have already seen how aggressively Microsoft is hitting Android with "licenses" and I'd say it would be wise to minimize as much risk as possible and remove Mono completely, for me and what I've seen of it, it offers no advantages that even come close to risking another avenue of attack for Microsoft on non-MS products."

Exactly. And Phoronix ignores the main problem people are having with Mono and Banshee which Microsoft says it reserves the right to sue over. It's not just about performance and technical merit (or lack thereof). We increasingly hear about Mono in the context of Wine, too. Here is the article in question. It says:

Concerns over this Mono and GTK#-using application were raised since Banshee has had some problems on ARM (the application freezing with a white screen) and Mono issues on ARM in general.

But why not mention the other issues? We have a wiki page dedicated to these. ⬆