Unity is a proprietary project that Mr. de Icaza is forever going on about in his blog. It is pure awesome rocks, of course. Here is a Windows screenshot:

Windows: The Mono Standard

Now, check out the Linux version and realize the true power of cross-platform development with Mono:

Linux: The Mono Alternative

Hmmm. That wasn’t as impressive as one hoped.

Just desserts

Do not worry, though, because since bringing Windows developers over to Linux is one-half of the whole point of Mono, and because the mono project is really promoting Unity, you can see the rewards when Unity is asked about Linux support:

The only decision we made so far is that “someday we will support it”. Nothing more concrete is decided yet.

Hooray! That and 30 pieces of silver will get you a Team Mono t-shirt! They have lots of nice things to say about Mono though:

Unity now enjoys a rapidly growing user base on both Windows and Mac OSX, and powers many types of game development, architecture visualization, advertising and educational solutions. “Looking back”, says Ante, “without Mono Unity wouldn’t have been possible.”

I for one am glad that Novell has torn the community apart to deliver a platform that delivers for the Windows and OSX and iPhone platforms. I think we can all agree it represents a major win for Linux; without Mono it wouldn’t have been possible.

But Microsoft technology is the best

If only there were some GPL cross-platform non-Microsoft tool that could develop 3D games and apps. I don’t expect FLOSS could deliver something like that without slavishly copying Microsoft. After all, C# and .NET represent the absolute pinnacle of technology.

We’d probably only end up with something that looked like this:

Not-mono: Not best-of-breed

Yeah, not much value in all that hippie GPL junk.

New Slogan Time

Mono: Extending Redmond’s Reach into Proprietary Platforms on the backs of “Open Source” developers since 2001. Also some Linux apps in there somewhere too.