The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

Not to go too far, but Microsoft is probably used by most people out there

Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent.

So if we're going to build new applications that require a large time investment, like say movie editing - today that doesn't matter for the enterprise desktop, but eventually it will when we get closer to consumers - you really need to have a cross-platform story.

We cannot choose one desktop over the other - Gnome or KDE - because there's users for both code bases.

Some scientists use TeX or LatEX but for most people Word is the thing that writers use these days.

Well Microsoft really does develop some really interesting technology.