Summary: Clarification regarding common misconceptions when it comes to Mono drawbacks

IN a new blog post from an opposer of Mono^*, the following argument is given:

And a mono skeptic like me would vote, (by this very blog post by the way) by saying, "I, Chao-Kuei Hung, recommend my employer, Chaoyang University of Technology, to use software linked with gtk and qt. I am willing to donate one full year's salary to my Univ if my Univ ever gets threatened by or has to pay for patents directly related to these libraries." BtW, one can vote for more than one library, as I did.

Now, the point is not that the employer would really accept the recommendation because of the assurance of a non-lawyer Chao-Kuei Hung. (In fact my Univ completely ignores even my repeated recommendations to use ODF for long term archiving considerations. They wouldn't even know what mono is, and they wouldn't care even if I were a law professor.) And the point is not that anyone would care about me losing one year's salary to my employer when bad things about patents happen.

A lot of the above speaks about software patents, which are not the main issue with Mono. The thing about Mono is that it's an implicit claim that .NET is "inevitable" and it is also used as a ramp for migrating GNU/Linux users to Windows. As the FSF explained, there are patent issues as well, but that is not the key point. There is a plethora of other reasons to reject Mono. ⬆

"Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat."

--James Plamondon, Microsoft Technical Evangelist. From Exhibit 3096; Comes v. Microsoft litigation [PDF]

____ ^* Most GNU/Linux users reject Mono, based on a poll which shows an approval rate of only around a quarter.