"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," stresses a famous saying. To Microsoft, however, it's more than just flattering and also an endorsement of the One Microsoft Way. To Microsoft it is additionally a chance to discriminate and even file lawsuits. Short of a lawsuit, Microsoft can tax/extort rivals. This whole paradigm of imitating Microsoft is truly a problem. Not only Mono is beneficial to Microsoft. Anything which promotes development and deployment with Microsoft APIs is likely to make Microsoft stronger. One such example is the work of former Microsoft people who take Samba too far and add patents to it. We are talking about Likewise, which according to this new announcement has just sold AD Bridge. Another company which does something similar is Centrify [1, 2], and it too has an announcement about AD. They help spread Microsoft, which ultimately leads to FOSS or Novell replaced being by Microsoft, as in this new case (not necessarily a shift through APIs). People must understand that Wine or Samba are not the same things because they are more like compatibility shims, whereas Mono for example encourages the creation of yet more dependence on Microsoft APIs. This point was stressed as the #1 issue with Mono when I did that recent video. ⬆