Summary: Mono and projects that are built with Mono are hardly maintained anymore, and some officially die

THE cult of Mono lost much of its following when it lost its sugar daddy, Novell. Banshee has not been updated in ages (it was a Novell project) and its lead developer left Novell too. According to Joey Sneddon, the Novell employee who worked on Pinta has officially given up, so we are seeing a trend here. Mono and Mono-based project from Novell staff are dropping like flies and the sooner Ubuntu realises this, the better. No distribution of GNU/Linux has a compelling reason to still preinstall the bloat which is Mono. Well, no distribution except Microsoft-sponsored ones like SUSE. Several weeks ago SUSE announced special relationship with the Mono startup, Xamarin. OpenSUSE 12.1 is now reaching beta and obviously it will include Mono.

In other news about Novell/SUSE, there is an event coming next month. The now-acquired VAR Guy writes: "6. Novell BrainShare (Oct. 10-14, Salt Lake City, Utah): Now owned by Attachmate, Novell needs to clearly communicate its partner strategy to three communities: SUSE Linux resellers, traditional Novell partners, and NetIQ partners. Those three communities now manage various products that were previously under a single Novell umbrella." Except for Microsoft, who are those SUSE Linux resellers? ⬆