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As Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza, the head of this project, has been blathering on about Mono for years and years, one did not expect that this announcement would have any more traction than the grandiose announcements of previous releases.

Mono, after all, is a project that tailgates APIs from Microsoft, and its development and adoption increasingly makes those who use it open to patent infringement claims by Microsoft.

Surprise, surprise! Many sections of the tech press went bonkers about this announcement. To use a phrase from a former Australian politician, a whole conga line of suckholes lined up to write about it and even interview de Icaza.

Some history for the uninitiated: De Icaza is the co-founder of the GNOME project, a desktop and development environment that was started in 1997. The apparent reason behind starting GNOME, when there was already one thriving desktop environment, KDE, was because KDE used QT, a toolkit from Trolltech which was not under a free software or open source software licence. KDE had kicked off in 1996 and, by the time GNOME came along, was already a pretty good desktop for GNU/Linux and UNIX. (QT has now been released under the GPL as well).

Along with Nat Friedman, De Icaza started a company in 1999; called International Gnome Support in the planning stages, it is better known as Helix Code and later as Ximian. The aim of the company was to market the GNOME desktop commercially. It was bought by Novell in August 2003.

De Icaza and Friedman were acquainted before they met - at Microsoft in 1997 where Friedman was an intern on the IIS team. De Icaza interviewed for a job at Redmond, to join the team that was porting the company's Java VM to the Sparc, but was unsuccessful.

(Talk about KDE and GNOME often degenerates into a flamewar. The two projects are supposedly cooperating on some aspects of desktop development; according to Wikipedia, both "participate in Freedesktop.org, an effort to standardise Unix desktop interoperability, although there is still some friendly competition between them."

The word friendly seems a bit odd, considering that in 2001 Ximian quietly used terms as "kde", "konqueror", "dcop" (the KDE "Desktop Communications Protocol"), and kparts (the KDE component model) as Google adwords for its own ads. When KDE developers Kurt Granroth and Andreas Pour published an article titled "'Business Ethics' in the Open Source Community?" which chastised Ximian for this deceitful practice, Friedman had sufficient chutzpah to say:  "We knew what we were doing," noting that Ximian's goal was to ensure "as many users for Ximian GNOME as possible," within the context of "friendly competition." That's one for the people who are putting out the next edition of "How to make friends and influence people" to note.)

In June 2001, Ximian set up the Mono project. Today the project defines itself as "an open development initiative sponsored by Novell to develop an open source, UNIX version of the Microsoft .NET development platform." The Novell bits were introduced in 2003 after the purchase of Ximian.