Way to go with shooting yourself in the foot, Bill! Good news on the I-hate-Windows front at last....

Way to go with shooting yourself in the foot, Bill! Good news on the I-hate-Windows front at last. Much as I hate the software-as-a-service model, it appears that the evil .NET initiative (or at least, the infrastructure which allows .NET applications to run, called the Common Language Interface) is an open standard. That means Linux users can create an open-source implementation of it, so .NET applications written for Windows can run on Linux, and Linux applications written for the open-source version of .NET (currently called "Mono" and spearheaded by the guy in charge of Gnome) will run on Windows: essentially making Windows an expensive and unnecessary component of an operating system -- you could use Linux instead, and Office would still work. Has Bill worked this out? This looks like an attempt to avoid antitrust destruction that has backfired, but then, that was the point of the whole antitrust lawsuit in the first place.