Ubuntu trojan horse or virus?

[Randall Ross]

Bad news. Ubuntu has Mono!

Wikipedia defines mono as follows:
1. "an infectious, very widespread viral disease caused by the
Epstein-Barr virus which well over 90% of all adults are exposed to at
some point in their life".. hmm, probably not an Ubuntu worry :)
2. "an open source implementation of Microsoft's Common Language
Infrastructure"

And Wikipedia defines a Trojan Horse as follows:
a) "A computer program that appears harmless but is harmful."

The Free Software Foundation has issued this warning about Mono:
i) "We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this
future danger."
and
ii) "Using patents to divide and conquer the free software community is
a fundamental part of [Microsoft's] corporate strategy. Because of that,
C# represents a unique threat to us. The language was developed inside
Microsoft, so it's likely they have many patents to cover different
aspects of its implementation. That would make free software
implementations of C#, like Mono, an easy target for attack."
(See http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono and
http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono)

Mono is "needed" on your Ubuntu system if you need any of the following
applications. Note that by need, I mean actually use on a regular basis
and for which no substitutes exists. (Note that substitutes do exist for
all of the following Mono Intrusion Vectors):
MonoDevelop, Muine, Banshee, Monsoon, Unity, Tomboy, libsecondlife,
KeePass2, iFolder 3, F-Spot, Gnome-do, Diva, Blam, Beagle, Galaxium,
Smuxi, Synapse

To protect your Ubuntu system, two packages can be removed by using the
Synaptic Package Manager. This will solve the problem (i.e. remove the
trojan horse and the Mono Intrusion Vectors listed above). Remove:
   mono-common
   libmono0
** Note that you will be warned of the removal of mono-dependent
applications.

To prevent recurrence of the problem, a package called
"mononono_1.0_all.deb" can be installed using the debian installer (Save
the .deb to your desktop and double-click it). Once installed, this will
warn you whenever a future mono-dependent installation task is about to
occur. The mononono package can be found here:
http://tim.thechases.com/mononono/

Please have a great, and trojan-free day!