Mono, argues this column, will likely prove to be a "covenant
with death," and Microsoft's participation in the project "a
bait-and-switch scheme to finally wipe out the threat of open
source":
"There's talk about alternative technologies to
Passport, but technology is not the issue. Unless some entrepreneur
creates a company to kill off Passport with a cheaper, better
service, Mono will be a covenant with death. If Ximian encourages
open-source developers to write e-commerce applications that access
Passport, it actually hands Microsoft the key to killing off
open-source e-commerce once and for all. Once Passport has a
foothold, Microsoft can update Passport and the .NET run-time
environment to break all those e-commerce applications built with
Mono."
