In some cases we've been building tools that are specific to Linux for the desktop, and they only work on Linux, but I see two major projects that are wildly, wildly successful: Mozilla and OpenOffice, and those two programs are cross platform.
Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent.
I think that by October the whole company has to migrate to OpenOffice, and then I think it's by June next year we all migrate to Linux - you don't want to migrate 6,000 people both operating system and office suite in a single jump.
Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.
The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.
Well Microsoft really does develop some really interesting technology.
We have a lot of existing customers which are also considering Linux desktop migrations and rolling out some of these programs, so we're learning from them.
We all love Linux, but it's also a fact that some people might not be able to migrate.
We've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice, but they're very close to the machine and what we wanted was to empower regular users to build applications for Linux.