Red Hat will not include Mono in RHEL 5

This article was passed along to me by a colleague. Though this is not big news it is one of those "good to know" things. Back in January when the Fedora project first announced they would include Mono and some Mono-based applications, Red Hat said they would not consider using Mono in RHEL. However, if Red Hat wants to include features like desktop-wide search, they need to include Mono. The above mentioned article says, "I think there are other good alternatives for searching." What would that be then? Locate-db? Regular expressions? All kidding aside, I am curious if there are alternative technologies Red Hat may use to fill this void, so if anyone has a suggestion, please leave a comment.

I'm also curious about the statement, "...I wouldn't be surprised to see an equivalent type Tomboy thing to emerge." The argument is that a relatively small application needs a huge amount of infrastructure to run. I'm not going to debate this statement, I'm not a developer and in no position to confirm or deny, but what this demonstrates to me is the OSS community's obsession with forking. "If you don't like some aspect of a project then start a new competing project!" Now, I'm not saying this is never called for (i.e. xorg), but I will say that it is very rarely the solution. Tomboy is becoming a more mature and useful application everyday, and there is no reason to throw all that away and re-invent the wheel. That is just stupid.

Ultimately, I think the most relevant statement is, "We also think the whole Java way to go with Web Services works just fine. Obviously with JBoss we made a strong commitment to that." That is the meat of it. Red Hat invested big time in Java and has always been a big proponent. Now that Java will be open source they can really go whole hog, and bet the farm on Java because it fits into their "open source or nothing" policy. Congratulations, Havoc. ;-)