The kids at Red Hat need to be checked out for Mono because it looks like they’ve accepted their software infrastructure into the Fedora project. This deal is significant because Mono does business with enemies of Red Hat including Novell and Microsoft.
Chris Blizzard, chief of Red Hat’s desktop line made the announcement on his blog on Monday:
Tonight Mono lands in rawhide, and will be included in FC5. We’re happy to enable another convenient method to use our core desktop platform. In this sense it joins all of the other enabling tools we have, including pygtk and java-gnome for Java. It’s already been used to build some pretty neat apps, including beagle, f-spot, and tomboy. We’ve been the longest holdout in shipping mono.
This was for a variety of reasons; some were business-related and others were strategic in nature but those don’t really matter right now. In the end we came to the conclusion that it should be part of our offerings. And we’re happy that we’re able to help heal the rift that was slowly growing in the GNOME community.
At this point, Mono stuff shows up in the new downloads from the Fedora site. Apparently, though, Mono wasn’t allowed in Core 3 or 4 but will be in Fedora Core 5. Mono includes Common Language Runtime for programs written in the C# language.
CNET quoted Mono dude Miguel de Icaza, the vice president of developer platforms at Novell and Mono guru:
“Here was a fork in the road for developers: Should I use Mono or not? We were both pushing different directions. That is gone. That’s pretty good for a Linux desktop standpoint.”
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
