I'm not aware of any proof on the contrary.
You can pick any related story about VFAT you want, it still doesn't say anything about Mono.

What would stop them? How about a dozen other companies with similar patent portfolios?

Gnotes is just a fork, line by line, done with the sole purpose of replacing Tomboy, worked on by one individual that's on some kind of a holly quest.
Not to mention that Gnote's license is GPL3, and porting features back in Tomboy (assuming there will ever be features worth porting) is currently not possible.

Tomboy, although it's "just a post-it" application, it does have usefulness and innovation in it.
Of course the Tomboy devs are annoyed. I would be too.

> If I use MS source code, I am required to release my code to Microsoft under their control and copyright

You're picking on a non-issue ... if you're using the .NET/Win32 apis then you're not required to release your source code to anyone's control. In fact you are free to release your source code under whatever license you want ... proprietary, BSD, GPL.

That's not the case with GPL. Surely using LGPL is a lot more reasonable ... in fact LGPL is my license of choice.
But I don't think the OSI open-source definition should allow for GPL ... there should be a rule in there that bans clauses that restrict your choice of license for your final product. That way license-incompatibilities wouldn't be a problem anymore.

Emacs has good GDB integration (it also integrates with the debuggers of Python and Perl, and can be integrated with any command-line debugger). It's basically what Eclipse CDT does (which also integrates with GDB).
Emacs also has a good LaTex editing mode.

That's the biggest advantage of Emacs over Vim. In Emacs you can integrate external tools without blocking the main thread, making it possible to execute those tools in the background. Emacs is a lot more IDE-like.

Why would you need UML modeling? Surely UML diagrams are good for documenting the code, but not for development.

> Except right now, it only supports WMV, WMA and MP3

Of course, but that doesn't say much about the actual codecs used. Flash uses FLV, so? Is that less proprietary?

Silverlight 3 has "extensible media support", which means you can use Ogg Vorbis/Theora formats if you'd like. A Mono implementation of Ogg Vorbis is already available for testing.

See here:
http://silverlight.net/themes/silverlight/getstarted/sl3beta.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#whatsnew
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-24-1.html

In a multi-language environment nothing beats a capable text editor like Vim or Emacs.

From my experience Eclipse is good for Java, awful for everything else. Eclipse plugins always have some unfixed in-your-face bugs, and while working on a C++ project (with CDT, which is in good shape compared to the rest) I just gave up and switched back to Emacs.

Also, you always need to make little tweaks here and there, and waiting for Eclipse to load the whole project just so you can edit a simple file ... is just painful.

For Java it's OK because of Java itself ... its APIs having been designed for IDEs (like instantiating 3 different classes to open a file with Unicode) so it's quite painful to work without intellisense. But while working on Java projects I also have a shortcut that opens the current file in Emacs and I use it quite a lot ;)

I'm not so fond of my experiences with Flash as you are ...

* a 64 bit edition was not available
* it wasn't and it isn't open-source. Moonlight is and it's not as shitty as the open-source Flash clones
* the point above is due to the Silverlight specifications, which ironically are a lot more open than Flash
* it wasn't available on BSD ... I haven't tried Moonlight on BSD yet but a port is possible(there might be problems with the binary codecs, but I think you can replace those)
* besides BSD, I think you can port Moonlight to whatever the hell you want (think Android, iPhone)
* in combination with Firefox on Linux it had a problem with transparency (and it really sucked)
* since I'm a programmer, I wanted to experiment with the latest version of Flex ... which targeted Flash 8

Not to mention the advantages inherent to Silverlight ... such as XML-based format (as opposed to binary), multiple languages support (with DLR, which will be integrated in Moonlight 2.0), and the ability to create content without having to use a brain-dead authoring tool.

I thought Qyoto was dead

> But Mono code will be limited practically to Linux. Or it might work on Windows in whatever limited way GTK stuff works there today. Certainly not likely to work on Mac's or various phone platforms.

I really don't get why some people are thinking inside the box like this.

Who said Mono is interesting only for WinForms/Gtk applications? Who said Gtk can be the only cross-platform GUI toolkit for Mono?

There actually is a wx.NET effort (wxWidgets) which is not really popular, but instead of bitching about it why don't you contribute? (you don't even have to start from scratch). Not to mention that you can design your interface in C++/Qt and access the resulting .dll from Mono.

Mono is most interesting to me for server-side applications because it has decent performance. Just last week I ported a NLP parser from Perl to Mono, and it was like 15 times faster. And I could've done it in C++ or Java, but working with expressive languages everyday it really hurts when working with those, but that's just me.