ACCORDING TO this, Novell's MonoDevelop finds a home on Windows where it fits nicely as a "cheap" Visual Studio. That's where Novell wishes to take Free software, turning it into a follower rather than a leader. But that's the bad news. There is some other stuff worth noticing; see for example how Microsoft Moonlight continues to fascinate mostly Microsoft folks [1, 2]. This morning we found this comment from former Microsoft employee John Bailo:

“Microsoft people (or former employees in this case) are pushing for Microsoft software to go inside GNU/Linux, including Microsoft DRM.”Again: Moonlight is not a port. To suggest it is a port of Silverlight is to suggest that Safari is a port of Mozilla Firefox because they both handle the same type of content (or similar content).

Bailo used to lurk and participate heavily in the Linux newsgroups over at USENET where he was considered a k00k or a troll by some. And as we were warned before, Microsoft people (or former employees in this case) are pushing for Microsoft software to go inside GNU/Linux, including Microsoft DRM. Nat Friedman too was a Microsoft employee and Miguel de Icaza tried to become one.

The good news is that Mono is getting pushed out as applications written in Mono become easily replaceable/swappable. A couple of readers have alerted us that Gnote made it to the default package selection for gNewSense/mipsel-l (not to be confused with gNewSense/i386). One of the readers explains: "Mipsel-l is the gnewsense port for Complete Free Netbook (open hardware+gnewsense) by Chinese Company Lemote. I am using this for last 3 months."

From: Robert Millan <rmh at aybabtu.com> Date: Thu, May 7, 2009 at 1:28 PM Subject: [Gnewsense-dev] Gnote in gNewSense/mipsel-l To: gnewsense-dev at nongnu.org

Hi,

Gnote [1] has been added to the default desktop selection for the gNewSense / mipsel-l port. I think that with version 0.3.1 it reached a level of maturity that makes it suitable replacement for Tomboy on environments where installing Mono/.NET is not possible or desired (in this case, due to lack of support for mipsel architecture).

[1] Gnote is a line-for-line rewrite of Tomboy to C++, for details see http://live.gnome.org/Gnote

--Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President, Microsoft