Found via Anthony, this interesting piece from Bryan Young: Mono and the Open Source Boom. I won't detail it paragraph by paragraph, as Anthony did a great job at that. What is surprising is the contradiction between the title and the content. Roughly half of the content is dedicated to how Microsoft is doing great things and how Microsoft understands everything, and the first thing understood is the great failure of Java. I won't go into the detail, the article is public, but you can see all the bias here. In Anthony's comments, Bryan Young praises himself for not having attended or read any of Microsoft marketing departement production, only having read a book on .net and some chapters on MSDN: here is another contradiction.

What there is to understand is not how Mono is going to bring something to the Open Source movement, but how lame some voices became over the years. The problem is not the acceptation or not of some "gift" from Microsoft: it is not acceptable, there is no gift. Microsoft has not the power it wants on the server market, thus it had to start a new PR campaign. On the desktop, .net is evolutionnary, the market is already acquired, the main remaining target is not Java, it's Delphi, that's why Microsoft hired Paul Gross and Anders Hejlsberg. What Mono really is: a free ticket. Microsoft makes a market pitch with "cross-platform", Open Source developers realize it. Microsoft says: Longhorn and Avalon are the best you could hope, Mono enthousiasts spread the word. It's not like the computing world needs Longhorn, neither .net, neither all the gag words: all of this is just a bet upon Moore's law. And less of all, Open Source community needs Mono, Yet Another "Cross Platform" Framework.