The concern about patents was sort of fair, but was as much a FUD red herring as anything else. There was the debate whether Microsoft&#x27;s .NET open patent promise at the time applied to Mono in general or just OpenSUSE&#x27;s distribution of Mono. In the time that the Ubuntu community spent debating that they could have done the simple thing that Red Hat did back then which was ask Microsoft to generalize the promise a bit more...<p>The issues of control were definite FUD, as Mono at the time was always an open source project first and foremost and it shouldn&#x27;t have mattered that most of its contributors were Novell employees at the time or Xamarin employees when Novell divested itself of much of its open source development staff.<p>The &quot;decline in Mono&quot; in Ubuntu had everything to do with FUD. Arguably Mono itself has never really seen a decline, it&#x27;s always been out there for the installation and usage. Even when priorities were focused elsewhere (because mobile efforts first at Novell and then at Xamarin paid the bills), Mono has seen stable development.<p>(Now you could say that Mono is in &quot;decline&quot; in today&#x27;s world, but only because first Roslyn and now .NET Core have been supplanting Mono as cross-platform open source efforts for C#&#x2F;.NET.)<p>As for Vala, I still don&#x27;t understand why as a developer I&#x27;d ever want to write Vala rather than C#. Vala still seems like a strange choice to me. Why build a &quot;Gnome-specific language&quot; that isn&#x27;t really useful outside of the bubble of Gtk?