"Like it or not, Red Hat still owns the majority of the Linux market between its Red Hat Enterprise line and the Fedora Project it sponsors. As such, as long as Red Hat refused to touch Mono--the open source, multi-platform implementation of Microsoft's .Net framework--various power struggles and problems were occurring.
"One of the largest issues was that the GNOME Project has heavily been moving in the Mono direction for its latest toolsets, using the Gtk# language, which was developed to allow GNOME libraries to be compiled through C and Microsoft's C#--the programming language developed by Microsoft for building .NET applications. For many Linux and open source advocates, the idea of selecting a Microsoft technology over just about anything else makes them either irate or gives them a headache. When asked why, issues mentioned range from potential patent conflict lawsuits to the fact that using anything from Microsoft feels to some like getting 'cooties' (for those international readers, cooties are an imaginary germ passed between the sexes before puberty amidst many cries of horror) from a member of the opposite sex in second grade (did anyone ever find a cure for that...?)"
