Mark Shuttleworth, the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the popular Ubuntu Linux distro, has announced his plans to rewrite all of Gnome, X11 and the Linux kernel using the Mono platform.
Mark Shuttleworth in Mono T-shirt
Mono - the open source re-implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework - has long been the subject of criticism from Free Software advocates as a potential patent minefield, particularly in the wake of Microsoft suing companies such as TomTom for other patent violations just recently.
But Shuttleworth, speaking from his gold-plated rocket ship, brushed aside any problems, saying, "Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, and, believe it or not, Microsoft employees are human beings too. We think we need to work closer with Microsoft to ensure heterogenous data silo paradigm middleware enhancements can continue to grow. Oh, and they gave me this nice T-shirt."
We tried to get in touch with Miguel de Icaza, the lead developer of the Mono project, but he was unavailable for comment, reportedly on a skiing trip somewhere near Redmond, Washington.
But a Novell spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous responded, saying, "neither Novell nor our good friends at Microsoft think Mono is a problem. Linux users have nothing to worry about, and we think Monobuntu should really silence all the Mono critics because it proves that we were right all along. So neener!"
While some might say that it's near-impossible to rewrite Gnome and the Linux kernel using Mono and C#, Shuttleworth has said the first fruits of the work will make it into Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. "We think it's important to start rolling out this cool stuff immediately. People are going to see some incredible performance benefits from the Mono switch, and I think Microsoft will happy to have some extra support in these trouble times. Plus this T-shirt is really nice. Go on, touch it - it's so soft!"