Click here to view Novell's press anouncement about Mono 1.0.
Miguel De Icaza has been working on project Mono for some time. Mono is an open-source .net environment. It includes development tools, such as a C# engine, and libraries that enable open-source applicatons to be developed for .net and deployed on open-source operating systems such as Linux.
Many in the open-source community were upset by Miguel's project, some labelling him a "sellout." I think Mono is a strategically important project. What Mono effectively does is prevent Microsoft from creating their own web services framework, which will only work with Microsoft operating systems and applications and not work properly with applications developed by others, even when those applications are developed to accepted standards. Those of you who develop web sites need only to look at Microsoft's refusal to properly support Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as a prime example of how Microsoft operates.
So, what Mono does is give open-source developers a tool to insure that web services applications developed under open-source operating systems will interoperate properly with web services apps developed on Microsoft platforms. This is a thankless task, as Miguel has found out. But nonetheless a critical one.