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Story: Stallman warns of Mono 'risk'

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To be Paranoid or NOT Paranoid?

I think he's most concerned with dilution of the base of experienced programmers available to work on GNU projects. Other than that, he might be paranoid.

Maybe I missed something in all the public BS flying back and forth a while back but I thought that Mono was at the very least tacitly endorsed by MS. It would be an incredibly idiotic PR thing to do for MS to sue the guys that are attempting to make the dotNet CLR/Mono the dominate API for all platforms not just Windows.

Mono is basically the only thing that will allow MS to compete with Java as the "runs on everything" software product. C# is the tip of the iceberg. The dotNet CLR is about as "generic" as Microsoft gets. Visual C++/C, Visual Basic, J#, F# and who knows what else all can be run on the CLR. It costs them absolutely nothing but patience for a guaranteed return.

Assuming the Mono programmers "reverse" engineer the entire CLR, the methods, properties etc. programs created by Microsoft programmers as well as FOSS programmers will run on Windows, Linux and other open source OS. FOSS programmers could make money re-compiling their code under Visual Studio and selling the resultant software to Windows users. And on top of that it will NOT be covered by the GPL. That might actually be what Stallman is paranoid about.

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