I agree their business tactics in the past, and recent present, have left a bad taste in many peoples mouths, my own included, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, this time, and see how they play this forward. I’m an open-minded individual and I’d really like to see them working with the Open Source community instead of against. Surely it can only benefit us all.

As for being forced to release the code under the GPL; quite simply this is brilliant if it was forced, it’s a credit to Open Source community that at the end of the day the GPL wins through.  Yes it was for selfish reasons, i.e. getting customers to run Linux on their VM architecture just as VMWare, another commercial vendor, have with their VMI interface in the kernel. Intrinsically by their very nature most Open Source projects originate from “a selfish itch” the developer (personal or commercial) needed to scratch. Some articles suggest they were linking closed source code with GPL code and thus in violation of the GPL, others suggest it was written with the GPL in mind. By this measure shouldn’t nVidia be forced to release their driver code under the GPL as they too have closed code compiled against GPL code (personal bugbear) !

I also agree the “Community Promise” is not perfect but is a, small, step in the right direction and further work needs to be done to assure the whole community, especially the whole patent issue. I despise vendor lock in, so an Open Source implementation of C# (be it Mono or dotGNU) aids the goal of allowing me to run my software on either Windows or Linux. It’s a win-win situation for me. Cross-platform interoperability is something I work with daily, professionally, and I’m quite vehement about it.

Finally I may be overly optimistic but that’s my nature, and No I’ve never worked for Microsoft and I’m definitely not a fan. I just enjoy the fact I can rely solely on Ubuntu, which is my OS of choice, to fulfil all my computing needs. Without an open source C# I’d need to keep a VM, or dual-boot, with some version of Windows & Visual Studio for work needs. Open Source development has given me the freedom to choose and we should encourage Open Development where everyone is welcome so long as they play fair.