I think there are three major types of critics of Mono in the Open Source community. Those who think Microsoft pays Novell for developing Mono to take over the world, those who think Mono is a project that will face patent problems in the future because Microsoft will claim copyright infringement and those who have a problem with Novell because of the patent agreement with Microsoft. Of course there are more. There are people who actually had a look at it and compare it to established platforms like the JVM and come to the conclusion that the Sun compiler is better than Mono or something similar. I agree that it’s perfectly okay to not like Mono because one is happy with the JVM or to hate Novell to sign that patent agreement with Microsoft. However none of that makes Mono as such a bad thing to have.
Mono itself is a fantastic piece of software and one of the best programming environments Linux users got since ages. The big advantage of it is that the Mono environment can host multiple programming languages, not just C#. Even though there are multiple languages running on top of it they can exchange code which is somewhat hard to achieve with the more traditional approaches. For example it’s nearly impossible to use a Python library with Ruby or the other way round. With Mono, IronRuby and IronPython this becomes somewhat possible. But I must agree that I haven’t played with that in detail so far. C# alone was convincing enough.
Read the whole thing by Armin Ronacher
I agree with is point. C# is the only mature (excludes D and Vala) that has bindings to linux/gnome features like GTK and DBUS. And the Java language is behind C#, I don’t know what those guys at Sun are doing…
Plus, it could be a nice way of migrating Windows developers to Linux platform!