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The dispute surrounding the integration of Mono in distributions has now reached Debian, after a lengthy debate among Ubuntu users as to whether Mono applications should be included with Ubuntu. Josselin Mouette, the developer of the note taking application Tomboy has made his software a part of Gnome on Debian Squeeze.

With Gnome, Debian users will not only be using Tomboy, but also Mono. Some Linux users see this chain of events as evil-doings because they believe that Microsoft will impose its patent provisions on Mono and thus potentially cause harm to Linux. The programming language used here is free implementation of .Net which the Gnome innovator Miguel de Icaza also began with.

The Tomboy implementation of Debian is further complicated by circumstances surrounding the C++ basedGnote. This exact clone of Tomboy was developed by Hubert Figuière and poses the question as to why the slimmer Gnote was not included in the distribution instead of Tomboy with its dependence of 40 MB. Instead, the developers intend to “perhaps... [write] new code which can later be ported to C++ in order to run faster, consume less memory and support more architectures”, according to Millan in his blog.

Josselin Mouette takes theopposite stance. Tomboy is allegedly an inclusion due to lack of space, but not a full on part of Debian. The problem has apparently been solved in that Tomboy is now supposed to be slimmer and where necessary, Gnote can be included. In addition, the possibility to decide which software Debian takes on is still open. The Tomboy circle also argue that Gnote was only written to off set the Mono dependencies. When included in the standard installation, the program has fulfilled its purpose, but there is no reason for further development to occur.

Mono developer Jo Shieldsstates reasons why Microsoft is unlikely to go up against Mono and argues from the perspective of the developer: Mono is supposed to be ideal when developing quick and easy applications and has advantages over Python, Java, C, and C++. This, however, plays little role for the inclusion in a distribution.Here, it is considered more important as to whether Mono has good applications. Shields accuses Mono opponents of complaining about Mono as hypocrites unable to write their own comparable applications in other program languages.

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