With .NET once an API is published it's available to all programming languages at the same time.

When it comes to .NET they've done a really outstanding job.

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

I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.

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've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice, but they're very close to the machine and what we wanted was to empower regular users to build applications for Linux.

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