Really, I mean it... Been reading a lot of the comments above, and all I feel like saying is, learning Arch isn't that hard yes it really is worth it. The Arch wikis will take you by the hand the whole time, and once you understand it, you'll feel like the true owner of your computer, no more such frustrations you guys are having with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Suse, Fedora or whatever... Arch solves all the problems these distros have plus gives you extreme control over your machine.

All they need is get rid of Mono once and for all and it would actually fit on a CD...

You must be using Ubuntu, cuz Gnome on my Arch desktop is damn fast (on Ubuntu it was getting slow as hell though)

Just asked the guy what he thinks via Twitter and posted about it here

Just sent two tweets to Miguel de Icaza about this:

@migueldeicaza So does it mean you will be somehow now working for Microsoft

@migueldeicaza Sorry meant to add a question mark... And how about IP rights for Mono? What does it mean copyrights-wise? Not worried?

And here's his answer:

@2green Dont know the answer to that.

Wow.

This sucks...

This is huge, and It's a first in Canada, AFAIK. If FACIL wins, this could be a great victory for FOSS and it could open other similar cases around the world. Please post this on the front page!!

I understand exactly what is the target audience for this. Let me give you a concrete example that happened to me recently. I am now working in China, and most Chinese IT guys I know here are MS-only guys who think the whole world revolves around MS products and nothing else exists, sadly it is a reality here (go try to find a Linux netbook in Shanghai - good luck). However, lately a sister school asked me to help their IT guys to install Moodle on their school's server (we run it on a Debian system), but THEY run everything on Microsoft/IIS and they have no intent whatsoever of trying anything Linux/Open Source. Therefore I found out (and the Chinese IT guys too) how inconvenient it is to install PHP stuff onto a Windows/IIS system. I showed these guys how easy it would've been to do the same installation under Linux through packages (sudo apt-get install moodle) and I think they were impressed but still are not interested in "learning" anything about Linux. Therefore I think they are EXACTLY the audience that MS are trying to reach at the moment. Solutions like Moodle are becoming more and more popular into the education sector and same goes for many CMS/PHP portals elsewhere, and many MS systems admins are now ASKED to install these programs but they have no idea how and have NEVER touched Linux... This would be exactly what they need, in order to please their boss with minimal effort.

Of course this is simply to facilitate lazy MS admin people to keep on using their Windows server instead of getting them attracted to a move over to Linux... Again MS is doing it to fight against the competition, nothing else.