The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
De Icaza has certainly come a long way from free software developer to enthusiastic Microsoft supporter - he even flaunts his visits to the Redmond campus.
Here he is, getting worked up on February 24 about a forthcoming visit to Microsoft: "My friend... (Youssef) and myself will be heading out to Redmond for the ALT.NET Seattle event this weekend. This will be my first ALT.NET conference and I do not know quite what to expect. Youssef keeps telling me "You should not prepare for this", but I feel like I should at least prepare something exciting to get the juices flowing for discussion."
I used to get excited that way in my teens and twenties when I was going out on a date.
When it comes to Mono, it looks like the shrewd folk who manage some of the better-known and more widely-used Linux distributions have more than just a clue.
The default installation of Debian Lenny, which was released on February 14, contains not a shred of anything to do with Mono in the default installation - the base system plus the standard desktop. One can add Mono from Debian's software archives if one wishes, but that would require an act of commission.
The same goes for Fedora. One can safely install the distribution without fear of having someone come a-knocking at night with hat in hand, asking for royalties for violating patents in Mono.
Both MEPIS and Knoppix are based on Debian and there is no sign of Mono in either of them.
It's a slightly different story in Ubuntu - Mono is part of the default install because it is part of the default GNOME desktop. However, it can be stripped it out in toto and one will only lose two insignificant applications, F-spot and TomBoy.
Slackware, the second oldest distribution, has no Mono either. In fact, developer Patrick Volkerding threw out GNOME itself a few years back.
Only OpenSUSE has Mono in abundance - why, Evolution, the default mail program is dependent on it and once you remove Mono, you have to bid goodbye to Evolution as well. But then there should be no surprise about this - Novell owns OpenSUSE, a project which is facing some problems right now.
All these observations are based on downloading the most recent version of each distribution mentioned, installing it and checking myself. No anecdotal evidence here, dear reader.
While Mono is pushed as free software, there are caveats about code contributions: "When a developer contributes code to the C# compiler or the Mono runtime engine, we require that the author grants Novell the right to relicense his/her contribution under other licensing terms. This allows Novell to re-distribute the Mono source code to parties that might not want to use the GPL or LGPL versions of the code. Particularly embedded system vendors obtain grants to the Mono runtime engine and modify it for their own purposes without having to release those changes back."
That's from the bible - the Mono licensing FAQ itself. Need one say more?
David Bass
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