And … Novell isn’t ‘mixed source’, they are proprietary.

This may be true, but I only said what Novell calls itself: mixed-source.

1. newbies who keep asking silly questions – overloading developers and/or ‘community champions’ who become less ‘happy to help’ on mailing lists and the like

2. people who demand it works like ‘product x’ ‘or i’ll go use something else’ – it’s hard not to take that personally, and all they’re doing is winding you up.

3. noisy bug reporters. Many people who go to the effort to report a bug treat it as the most important issue in the product, neglecting all other bugs or priorities.

4. people who demand it works like ‘product x’ and provides some (often hacked up low-quality) patch to make it work that way. Ignoring any existing UI standards or underlying product philosophy along the way. Often you can never accept it even if they clean it up, and all it does is get everyone upset.

5. people who see a whole new way of doing everything/a big chunk of the application. Ignoring often years of learning-by-mistake that got the project to the place it is. They can be quite disruptive, particularly if they gain a following of users/non-core developers.

6. Constant criticisers. No matter what you’re product is, some small percentage of people will always bag it at every opportunity – even if they’ve never used it. And the more popular it is, the more of these you get. It wears you down.

Maybe i’m just weak as piss, but all that burnt me out working on Evolution, and quite frankly I would not wish that experience on my worst enemies.

Porting to Windows will certainly increase type 1 by far the most, but also increase the other parts as well (2, 4, particularly if said free product was a clone of some proprietary product in the first place). I think it would be the absolutely LAST thing any free software developer would want. Particularly irritating should be the fact that you’re supporting a proprietary platform at the same time – you’re helping M$ make more money. How’s that feel?

I don’t think mono will really suffer from this, at least in the medium term. Firstly because mono is a poor second cousin to .NET – you need to reach a critical mass of quality before you get a critical mass of newbie lusers (ab)using it. Also because why would any developer use mono on windows when they have a free download from M$? And a little toy application like tomboy is unlikely to attract enough attention, or even if it did, it is so small it can hardly have major issues to solve any more.

And … Novell isn’t ‘mixed source’, they are proprietary. You can be as partially proprietary as you can be partially pregnant. They might sponsor some free software projects, but so does Sun and IBM (hell, and M$), and nobody is arguing those are anything but proprietary software companies.