Luis Villa

I have to agree. Even Gnome developers described the thing as "putting our balls in Redmond's hands": http://lu.is/blog/index.cgi/531.html. In fact the mono patent situation remained unclear for years, until 2009 if I remember correctly.
And in 2006 there was the whole Novell-Microsoft kerfuffle, with Ballmer saying that only Suse Linux users were not violating Microsoft intellectual property http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2006/11/16/ballmer-on-novell-linux-and-patents/.

So I really would not call the reaction FUD.

Also, adding my personal experience from that period, I'd say that many Linux desktop users, myself included, were not interested in adding mono as another dependency to the stack, especially to run three applications: a note-taking application (tomboy), photo management (f-spot) or the banshee music player(which, I'm sorry to say, was one of the most crash-happy pieces of gnome).
Samba and ffmpeg (well, the patented parts thereof) were never meant to be building blocks on which to write a lot free software, they are ways to ensure compatibility with existing closed solutions.
I have some simpathy for de Icaza's idea that, since C# is a nice programming language, people should be encouraged and helped to use it, but the combination of patents' threat and frankly the "let's just put it in gnome!" approach doomed the effort.
Also, in hindsight, mono would have (has?) worked better in the entreprise sector, rather than in desktop environment (Ruby is about as…

The bold caps are nearly unreadable. All caps is advocated against by many sources, like Typography for Lawyers (http://typographyforlawyers.com/all-caps.html), which specifically calls out bold caps. Even the Mozilla Public License abandoned all-caps for conspicuous text:

http://lu.is/blog/2012/08/19/a-quick-note-on-conspicuous-text-also-known-as-all-caps/

Bryan Garner, a noted expert on legal writing (and editor of Black's Law Dictionary), agrees:

> And the worst conventions in contracts?

> Caps for contract text that is required to be “conspicuous.” The 9th Circuit has rightly noted that “lawyers who think their caps-lock keys are instant ‘make conspicuous’ buttons are deluded.”

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/4_vignettes_lead_to_a_single_moral_about_writing_better_briefs