Much has been written about the fact that the next version of Ubuntu, Natty Narwhal, will switch its interface from GNOME to Canonical's own Unity interface.

Last week, Miguel de Icaza, a vice-president at Novell, announced the release of version 2.8 of Mono, a project he set up to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment.

When Hubert Figuiere, a developer who had lost his job with Novell in the first quarter of 2009, released the note-taking application Gnote on April 1 last year, one doubts that he had any idea about the kind of attacks which would be launched on him by Mono advocates and apologists.

Miguel de Icaza, a vice-president at Novell and the founder of the Mono project, made a number of statements recently that were diametrically opposed to all that he has said earlier about Microsoft's .NET development environment.

Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that it has cast on the system, Novell vice-president and Microsoft MVP, Miguel de Icaza, is quoted as telling the website, Software Development Times, recently.

As the year ends, it is fair to say there have been many free and open source software organisations that have made rapid strides, not merely in 2009 but right through the noughties. But one organisation badly needs to get its act together.

Novell has announced the release of Moonlight 2.0, an updated version of its attempt to clone Microsoft's Silverlight, and extended its availability to other distributions - with a rider attached.

A member of the GNOME Foundation board has denied that a post by GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza led to a discussion on the Foundation mailing list which resulted in a call for the project to cut its ties with the GNU Project.

One of the best sources for news about Microsoft on the web these days is the personal blog of Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza.

The latest release of Red Hat's community GNU/Linux distribution, Fedora, installs Mono and Windows.Forms by default from DVD, an Unix developer has found.