Well Microsoft really does develop some really interesting technology.

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

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.

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

There is a point in your life when you realize that you have written enough destructors.

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

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