Summary: Infragistics adds its weight to Mono at times when Novell's future is mostly unknown and OpenSUSE rethinks its strategy

THERE HAS BEEN almost no news from Novell in recent weeks. Well, maybe the expected sale of the company suppresses business, but it's hard to tell for sure. Statistically speaking, OpenSUSE too has had little to tell, apart from some strategy discussions (there is lack of foresight or focus) and an announcement about the release candidate of OpenSUSE 11.3.

As we pointed out a couple of days ago, Mono and Moonlight have also gone quite silent, with the exception of MeeGo news [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

Based on the following new press release, a company that's mostly associated with Microsoft gives Mono a boost.

Infragistics, the experience design software company and world leader in user interface (UI) development tools, today announced that the 2010 Volume 2 version of NetAdvantage for .NET will include the ASP.NET toolkit which is fully compatible with the Mono framework from Novell. With the most powerful UI controls available for ASP.NET, Infragistics enables .NET developers to rapidly build and style high-fidelity, full-featured line of business applications and deploy in a Linux environment.

Spreading Mono is spreading the Microsoft API (never mind the issue of software patents). Bad idea. As it was put by a blogger yesterday, "Mono is a disease. Why spread it?"

In case you don't already know about it, the whole purpose of mono for Linux (hereafter just mono) is simply to allow microsofts self serving language and sub-standard net protocols to work under Linux. This project is hosted by Novell which entered into a partnership with microsoft because they were spooked by the whole license and litigation saber rattling of a few years ago.

Now c#, which is the programing language mono supports, is what I call a claytons language. You may not know what I mean so I will explain. Claytons is a non-alcoholic drink which mimics an alcoholic drink. It's slogan is "The drink you have when you are not having a drink". Which is what I think about c#. It's the programing language you have when you don't know a programing language.

Due to this matrimony between Novell and microsoft, this mono, and its bed buddy moonlight, have been spreading throughout the Linux family. This has been causing me some dis-ease. Linux advocates, even those who purport to hate microsoft, have been running around and willingly catching mono. What they do not realise is that they are contributing to microsofts success at the expense of Linux.

[...]

In short, I think that mono is a disease which infects Linux distributions and is not much different than its biological viral namesake. For that very reason I do not have mono installed on any of my Linux distributions. I do not even look at any program or distribution which forces me to install mono. For that matter I do not even consider Novell products when thinking about Linux. However, that is just me :)

It's not just him. An unscientific poll from last year showed that 72% of GNU/Linux users say "No" to Mono. That was before the FSF added its opposition to Mono/C#. ⬆