Ars Technica gets it all wrong right from the start, but that’s to be expected as Ryan Paul never has a critical thing to say about mono.

This dude is my favorite pretend Linux journalist. He’s sort of like the Mono Rob Enderle. Seriously, if you have time just scan back through his mono / moonlight articles. Worth a chuckle.

Anway our hard-hitting investigative journalist starts off with a balanced look at the news:

Microsoft has announced that it will apply the Community Promise to ECMA standards 334 and 335, the specifications that describe the C# programming language and .NET Common Language Infrastructure. This means that Microsoft is providing a legally binding guarantee that it will not enforce its patents against Mono and other third-party implementations of the standards.

This is perfectly accurate except that it means nothing of the sort. Oh well, after 11 paragraphs of talking about how awesome mono is, how Open Source friendly Microsoft is, and how how awesome mono is, he finally slips this in bit at the end of paragraph 12:

The area covered by those standards includes the C# programming language, all the relevant parts of the runtime environment, and the standard library. It does not include ASP.NET, the WinForms APIs, or other proprietary Microsoft technologies.

And he follows this up with:

It’s worth noting that the popular Mono-based desktop Linux applications that were mentioned previously in this article are all using GTK# and other components of the GNOME stack. This means that they fit within the boundaries of what is protected by the Community Promise.

But I don’t think so.

I said I was willing to temper my criticism and give mono apologists the benefit of the doubt on this deal. It is looking like there is some fast-and-loose going on with the fact that Banshee and F-Spot do indeed rely on stuff outside of the standard.

Finally, I’m sad to see at least one mono apologist continues the grand tradition of vilification:

It’s unclear, however, if anything will be able to change the views of the vocal minority of extremists who believe that Mono is part of a ploy to undermine the Linux platform.

It’s funny, becuse I don’t look like an extremist. (rms sorta does though, I’ll give you that.)