Source: "Mono, the Trojan" (reused with permission)

Summary: The latest updates about Novell's work that appeases its funding source from Redmond: Moonlight, MonoDevelop, Banshee, etc.

VISUAL ILLUSTRATIONS are fun. Check out the image at the top. It nicely captures the situation with respect to Mono and Moonlight, which are Novell's main 'gifts' to GNU/Linux. Fortunately, neither developers nor users are interested in Mono.

Let's remind ourselves what Novell is doing to Free software. Starting with Moonlight, here is a new article:

The difficulty of watching the Olympics online reveals the dangers of a more restricted Internet.

[...]

NBC asked me to download Microsoft Starlight. I hit the download page. Uh-oh—I use Linux. Microsoft was not impressed, and sent me chasing the related Novell product, which I installed.

Back to NBC. NBC asked me to download Starlight again. No other link was live. Suffice it so say this loop of joy apparently goes on forever.

So it doesn't even work, which is probably why Moblin has rejected Moonlight [1, 2, 3]. Moblin and Maemo are now being merged to make MeeGo, which Novell is already trying to infect with Mono. Here is more coverage of this. Novell's Ian Bruce mentions it as well (he is Novell's PR Director).

Based on the following new post, Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza has urged the MonoDevelop team to enable opening of .exe and .dll files, adding even further to the .NET bias of the software (which incorporates an advantage to Windows [1, 2]).

Miguel recently blogged about a trick for loading an executable assembly as a project inside MonoDevelop. I have now added native support for this feature, which means that it is now possible to directly open a .exe or .dll as a project, or add it to an existing solution.

Meanwhile, Novell releases a new version of a Mono application called Banshee, which only Novell customers can use safely (for the next two years). Banshee strives to replace perfectly acceptable applications that do not use Microsoft's APIs and also make use of the GPL (unlike Banshee). Then there is Tomboy, which has attached itself to GNOME, though luckily we have Gnote now [1, 2, 3, 4] (Tony Manco shows us that another new project is called GNote). ⬆