Summary: How Mono and Mono-based projects (e.g. Banshee) harm GNU/Linux by making its adversaries stronger

EARLIER in the week and last week we wrote about Novell's latest promotion of Microsoft's Visual Studio [1, 2, 3]. According to Novell's press release, proprietary operating systems are being added to Novell's Mono offerings and IDG has more to say.

Adds support for Mac OS X and Mono on Windows; Faster deployment and ease-of-use for millions of .NET developers

Novell is still popularising .NET, which is the wrong thing to do. "Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory," says Microsoft [PDF] and "every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat."

“Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory...”
      --MicrosoftOne of Novell's projects that not only advances .NET but also falls outside the MCP for Mono (which makes it a patent threat) is Banshee. Now that GNOME is looking for funds it is making some money-grabbing moves (the dying LiMo is sidling with GNOME) and one of these latest moves is promotion of Amazon-Banshee. There are many problems with this, ranging from Amazon's practices (notorious software patents, Fog Computing, Microsoft patent tax on GNU/Linux at Amazon), the support of RIAA-tainted 'content', support of Novell, dependence on Mono (Microsoft API), and MP3 format (MPEG-LA cartel).

But anyway, people are told about supporting GNOME by supporting Novell, Banshee, Mono, and all the above.

As a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program, the GNOME Foundation receives a commission for every purchase of music made through Banshee.

This is probably considered pragmatic, but the problem is that it makes stronger (financially) some of the biggest threats to GNU/Linux, not just GNOME. In pretty much the same way, Mono makes Microsoft stronger and helps sell Visual Studio. It makes Windows stronger [1, 2, 3]. ⬆