OUR dear Mr. Forbes has brought to our attention his observation that, despite the fact that Mono is dead as a Novell project and is now running on funds from Miguel de Icaza et al. (spending his own savings promoting Microsoft's patents-encumbered APIs), Fedora still includes Mono in Rawhide. They actually removed Mono some years ago (from final releases), so it is not clear why nightlies/intermediate builds still have it. It's not exactly news, but it is worth getting an answer to the question, why even bother with Mono at all?

Less than an hour ago one reader asked (in IRC): "When will GIMP go back into Ubuntu's CD?"

Forbes replied: "Doesn't seem so, though some official Ubuntu derivatives like Xubuntu still include it by default" (this can be confirmed).

The other reader noted that "room can be made by removing Mono and Mono-dependent apps" (we made this point many times before).

"Hopefully," said Forbes, "with the BS surrounding the current state of "official" Mono development, the removal may actually happen"

"I look forward to the removal. it is more than just wasting space," concluded the anonymous reader. " There are better apps it is holding back" and "Mono slows down performance in other ways as well," noted Forbes. It's true. ⬆