“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…?)”