Those are good questions! Especially when you make the point on how to distinguish some effort from Novell vs. individual employees deciding on C#. I feel I could construct a well-reasoned argument, but I’m not so sure I could provide hard evidence.

It’s entirely possible that there is evidence for this “strong promotion” thesis. I don’t know of any, however I haven’t searched extensively. For projects where replacing existing GNOME functionality was clearly a goal (gnome-main-menu, gnome-control-centre), Novell employees have used C.

Thanks for the comments!

One question: are you saying that Novell is not deliberately promoting Mono? Or that they are promoting Mono, but not by developing compelling applications that require it?

I wasn’t aware that anyone held the opinion that Novell was not deliberately promoting Mono, including developing applications (and plug-ins) that rely on mono. If people actually hold that opinion I would like to address it directly!

That doesn’t negate his actual point – Novell may well be deliberately promoting Mono by encouraging the development of compelling applications that require it. I’m not aware of any evidence for this, however, any more than Canonical is deliberately promoting Python by writing lots of apps in it. The fact that Novell also develops apps in other languages (Evolution, gnome-main-menu, gnome-control-center) might suggest that they are trying to use an appropriate language for the job.

Dan Serban :

I’d love to see some statistics on how many Mono apps are actually actively developed outside the umbrella of Mono-friendly distros.
By Mono-friendly distros I mean openSUSE and Ubuntu.
Please correct my facts on this if I’m wrong:
- Lead devs for Tomboy, F-Spot and Banshee = Novell employees.
- Lead dev for GnomeDo = Canonical employee.
Please add to this list if you have detailed knowledge on other Mono apps.

Of course, GNOME Do was initially developed as a final year University computer science project, and David has only recently been hired by Canonical.

There are a few that Team Mono has targeted which have good mono support, and a few that seem to shrug and say “if it works on mono, great, if not I don’t care”, and a few that are actually hostile to mono.