Microsoft did not threaten any Kinect hackers when they reversed that protocol...

"iCloud... When it is down, that is actually a feature."

Well, while I'm in charge, they can bring them alright but they can't plug them or use them for anything work related. Won't there be a capacity for company issued devices in five years time?

I think the interest in publishing these stories stems from the contrast between the death and hardship suffered on the workers' side, as opposed to the blatant enjoyment and consumerism of using non-essential things like iPads, portraying a sort of class gap intending to elicit feelings of guilt. I have a rooted Android tablet (nook color); therefore I am entitled to feel good, twice!

Haven't we seen all these rights given somehow used in the wrong contexts? Such as the spying of people by government officers for petty reasons?

Java isn't native to Linux. But I get what you were trying to say.

I don't think they will be GPL and LGPL? The MonoTouch and MonoDroid clones will be commercial offerings following a similar closed philosophy according to Miguel de Icaza (see www.tirania.org/blog)

This brings on the specter of legal action by Attachmate. While there has always been the thought that Mono could be sued by Microsoft, such as lawsuit would require Microsoft convincing a court that it was “just kidding” and the CLR/C# patent covenants are non-binding. Between their obligations to the ECMA standards body and the legal principal of equitable estoppel, the chance of this happening is slim to none. Attachmate is a completely different story. Even if they aren’t supporting it, they do own a product that is in direct competition with Xamarin’s future offerings. Without some sort of legal arrangement between Attachmate and Xamarin, the latter would face the daunting prospect of proving that their new development doesn’t use any the technology that the old one did. As a result of this, as well as the general uncertainty of any new product, some developers on the mono-android mailing list are stating that they are moving back to Java development for now. Source: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/Mono-II

Well money is one thing. Leadership is another esp. if you're the alpha male type.

Just one word: VFAT

My remark is not as trollish as you would like to portray it. See http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility for instance.

Everything you see there except for the C# language and a few other bits, are all *at risk*. Things like ADO.NET (used by every persistence layer such as NHibernate, Entity Framework, Linq to SQL, etc), ASP.NET, Winforms, Silverlight, Parallel frameworks, Code Contracts, WCF, WF, etc. etc. Even WPF if they ever decide to clone it.

If Microsoft is so pro open source why don't they open up the rest of the stack (for instance WPF)?

Somebody likes his Tolkien... :)

It's great, but there aren't that many to begin with, so I hope this atleast breaks even. I like plurality in my programming life!

Truth hurts?

Uhm, it does, but Mono uses AOT (Ahead of Time), which is different. Wikipedia is your friend.