Development at Novell continues to be very vibrant. We mentioned Novell's Hack Week only briefly on Saturday, but it is now over.

It is always great to see development marathons, but one thing that stands out is development with Mono, whose increasing role and presence in Novell's Linux has become worrisome if all factors are considered. To Novell, .NET might seem 'safe' because it pay Microsoft, but some other distributors consider Mono a no-go area.

In any event, one of the fruits of Hack Week are Mono desklets, which make use of Microsoft-patented technology.

The Mono project team created a desktop widgets environment similar to SuperKaramba or gDesklets. While in early development the C# based project has interesting features like running separate or combined sandboxes.

Not everyone is happy with the isolated moves towards Mono. To quote an example that we have not mentioned in the past:

You can call it FUD, but for me it's a question of investing my time and energy in technology that are and will be available on the platforms I use (Mac OS X and Linux). I don't trust Microsoft and I don't trust Novell anymore either. Who knows when Microsoft will bring out it's (sic) patents and kill Mono use outside of Novell? I think .NET is good if you want to develop for Windows only. For cross platform development I would not use it - I would go for Java.

Welcoming developers from the 'Windows world' is one thing. Introducing youngsters to languages that are not platform-agnostic is another. The mind finds no comfort in Novell's .NET education for young programmers where "The ultimate goal of the series is to give students a solid grounding in programming using the Mono/C# framework". Novell's top priority ought to be languages that are not Free software-hostile. Why introduce fresh minds to this trap instead of giving them free tools and freely-transferable skills?