Miguel de Icaza

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.

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.

When it comes to .NET they've done a really outstanding job.

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.

We all love Linux, but it's also a fact that some people might not be able to migrate.

In the GNOME project we tried to keep the platform language independent.

I've never worked with the Java community.

With .NET once an API is published it's available to all programming languages at the same time.

So if we're going to build new applications that require a large time investment, like say movie editing - today that doesn't matter for the enterprise desktop, but eventually it will when we get closer to consumers - you really need to have a cross-platform story.

Well Microsoft really does develop some really interesting technology.

They have a beautiful security system and we're emulating the whole security infrastructure.

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.