GNOME and Mono continue to be separable and it's important to keep it that way. In practice, however, the two are often combined to form GNU/Linux distributions. Yes, unfortunately enough, Mono is also in Fedora. It's in almost every modern distro with GNOME (if not all the popular ones). Here is the analysis of Ubuntu. We contacted Fedora's leader and Mark Shuttleworth, from whom the Reply was this. They remain unconvinced and unalerted.

Another separability to consider is one that divides free GNU/Linux distributions from ones which Microsoft is milking through software patent deals.

Some time ago, Florian von Kurnatowski from Xandros (formerly of Scalix, which was acquired) said to us about Eee PC that there was "no impact or royalties to Redmond in this case, most of it open source, the stuff that’s not ours and Asus’ own development, and given the numbers this little thingy leaves the building in, actually one of the most successful end-user products based on open technology, ever."

Despite all of this, Sam Varghese seems to insist otherwise. He believes that the Eee PC from ASUS is either affected by the deal or is somewhat of a timebomb ("Trojan horse" is what he calls it)..

Could the eeePC end up being Microsoft's trojan horse?

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In the excitement of the moment, everyone seems to have forgotten that Xandros is one of the companies that lined up meekly in June 2007 to sign a patent deal with Microsoft.

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No, this kind of patent deal works through the fear factor. Once there is a sufficient large number of people using the software that is susceptible to the FUD factor, the company which has IP in the mix begins a campaign through issuing warnings of one kind or the other.

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For the moment, the eeePC is free of insidious software like Mono and Silverlight, both the creations of the GNOME project co-founder Miguel de Icaza, and both posing susceptible to posing patent threats as they are both implementations of Microsoft technology.

Right now, there is no talk from the folk at Microsoft about any kind of patent threat. That kind of talk seems to have disappeared. But remember the deal with Xandros is a five-year affair - it runs till 2011. What happens after that?