I’m aware that your personal preference would be for Banshee to make no feature improvements at all and cease development and distribution, but in a real world where that’s not very likely, your argument seems to be: “project I don’t approve offers new features, which means more for me not to approve of”, which is certainly your perogative, but the fact is that in this case, the developer community around Banshee showed more ambition and initiative to implement this, which is pretty unimpeachable from a technical and community standpoint surrounding the project.

Note too that Neil worked under the Google Summer of Code for GNOME (not Mono), is in no way associated with Novell, and was mentored by Bertrand Lorentz, one of the Banshee developers who also has no Novell association.

Users of Telepathy will have another reason to install Banshee.

Neil’s project is an extension to Banshee (not Telepathy), so that music sharing in Banshee can be done using the same stack that implements sharing for the rest of the free desktop. Telepathy has no ties to Mono whatsoever, other than a set of generated C# bindings, and nothing that Sandy talks about there is in anyway “extending” Telepathy, with Mono-based software or anything else.

It seems to me that what Neil did is what you would applaud elsewhere: using the standard protocol so that Banshee’s music sharing isn’t inventing its own non-interoperable interface.