I always thought RMS was strangly silent on the Mono issue, other than passing comments or references here and there. He has now posted a short, concise summary of his views on C# and Mono. He sums up his points as follows:
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn’t make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.
The full essay is here.
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Ok that confrims…I like Mono even more!
All kidding aside, I kind of agree with Stallman. However, this just seems like one of those things that Microsoft has the ability to do, but probably won’t. The same can be said about other languages too. Technically, assembler languages might be considered patent infringing since they are so closely tied to the machine code instruction set of the common CPU. So next we have to develop our own CPU too??
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