Again, the problem with Mono is Microsoft. Why bother getting your code infected and getting anywhere near Microsoft if you're programming for Linux? You're just inviting a lawsuit that will kill you. Even if you survive a frivolous suit, you've still lost millions. It was Microsoft who funded SCO for a decade. It's Microsoft who regularly rattles their patent saber, claiming that Linux violates over 235 Microsoft patents and Microsoft is willing to sue without notice (Steve Ballmer loves to pull this one out in at least one interview per year).
Once you lose trust with a company, e.g., Google, you have almost no reason to give them a second or 16th chance at screwing you or your data.
I don't mind being called cheap. Like many Americans, I live paycheck to paycheck, one disaster away from losing what little I have. It's also the same reason I live a "small" life. The few times I have taken chances, I've usually gotten screwed by an employer, sued (and lost), or even been called into the Attorney General's office for a one-way talk.
The same argument that states, "Everyone uses Microsoft Office" can also be said about a lot of proprietary programs or cloud services. For example, from 2007 to early 2010, you could say "Everyone uses an iPhone." But in turn would you therefore have us pay Apple for the privilege of being a market leader, thus shutting down any competition and ensuring Apple "wins"? That's being a prisoner of the moment. But let's also not confuse a
program with a a format; even Microsoft 2010 can write and save files in ODF. And while I like
LibreOffice, I would never say everyone should use it. (OpenOffice is effectively dead now that Oracle controls it, so you'll see it dwindle soon.)
The cloud has already made the OS irrelevant for me. I can visit and do anything on any site I want involving multimedia on my Linux machine. The only things left that I (personally) do on the desktop is (1) spreadsheet work, (2) photo editing, and (3) other
LibreOffice tasks. I'm just an end user, not a corporation, not a company, not a programmer. I used to do everything on the desktop, but again, free cloud services has taken much of that away. One example: I no longer keep MP3's on my HD, instead I have several dozen playlists of songs from YouTube, most of them HQ and/or concert performances. It's pretty cool to hear (and see) David Bowie play variations of the same song over the past 41 years!
I could go on. But my point is simple: I'm not ceding any ground or money to a
corporation, be it Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, or the ever-growing behemoth, Google. A corporation does not have my interest at stake, does not share my values toward open data, and has not earned my trust. Like governments, they will inevitably disappoint. Microsoft, Apple, and Google will justify just about anything to sell their products in China, even piracy and theft of their IP when China decides they're ready to keep the profit for themselves. Chinese jackasses hacked my Google account earlier this year and instead of letting me know something, Google just canceled my account and my data! (I had it all backed up, but they didn't even have the decency to inform me until eight weeks later what had happened to my account.) Go figure.
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