thelinuxlink.net

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 43&q=Linux

At 42:47 of the video Mark is asked about whether Ubuntu will keep Mono in Ubuntu. He responds...

"On Mono? Careful who you kiss? Maybe Novell should have thought of that. So we don't know the terms of the deal yet. It's unclear. I understand that Microsoft and Novell are frantically rewriting the terms of the deal as they figure out what a minefield they walked into. I hope somebody loses a foot. But until we actually fully know the terms of the deal we can't really comment. I will say that I think this is probably only the first move by Microsoft to really start actively countering what they see as an emerging threat. Free software has had a huge impact on the software industry if you look below the sort of first five companies. Most of the news, most of the headlines, are taken up by the top five software companies globally, and now we are seeing free software really starting to impact. Oracle, Microsoft, both making major announcements in the last two weeks. On Mono? We're gonna ship it. So it's in Edgy. It will be in Feisty."

Microsoft is so huge that the left hand often doesn't know what the right hand is doing. There's so much that has been said about this deal that I think it's been blown out of proportion to on one hand and justifiable in the concern on the other hand.

On the Open Source side, you have much nashing of teeth because it looks, to them, to be a payoff. Microsoft gave Novell money and they in turn said they would not sue Novell's Open SuSE users. (at least this is where I think it is....)

On the Microsoft side, I think alot of people think why WOULDN'T Microsoft want to be able to access data on Linux servers and what not.

In the end run, I think that both companies thought that this would be a good deal and both companies thought they were just trying to help both sides.

In the long long run....I think this whole deal will just blow over like teh IBM vs SCO case and Microsoft will actually just try and compete with Linux, or may even join them depending on how well Vista and Vista server works.

Mono itself is a noble thing. I think .Net gets derided entirely too much. I have messed around with it and it's not as bad as some people say. It's WAY better then the old MFC classes.

If anything, Sun should take a real close look at C# because it's so much like Java in some respects it's SCARY!