Richard Stallman has published an opinion on the matter of Debian including the Mono project in order to support some C# projects.

He warns that it “leads the community in a risky direction” citing Microsoft’s possible enforcement of patents as seen at http://swpat.org and http://progfree.org.

His point is the dependence on the C# for applications “means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.” “We should discourage people from writing programs in C#,” he continues. It’s not the language, but the dependence that causes the problem.

Make it an option, don’t include it by default, simply for Tomboy (“Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application which is simple and easy to use. It lets you organise your notes intelligently by allowing you to easily link ideas together with Wiki style interconnects.”) etc.

I dare say he has a point.

The League of Programming Freedom’s website is at http://progfree.org and synch.cc, the Cape Town based open source consultancy on secure network communications is at http://synch.cc – but you knew that already 🙂