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Mono will always lag behind the microsoft version. MS will release a new version, new language enhancements, new cool libraries and Mono will spend the next year reimplementing those...

I don't think Mono is behind MS, because Mono is not equal .Net.
We don't have to care what .Net and MS are doing, we have C# and the CLI as ISO standard (much more than we have from java) and with these two things we can create a great framework for the whole UNIX platform even with some compatibility to windows. That's simply great and it's completely independent from what MS is doing with .Net.

also don't understand why re-engineering a MS produkt is a good thing while we have Java as an established solution that provides so much more and is way more mature.

it's not a MS produkt, it's a ISO standard like many other languages (beside java). And based on this standard we can create a great platform for UNIX. We don't have to care about what MS is doing based on the standard, that's not our problem.
For example, it's the same like MS has an C compiler and Unix has an C compiler. Both has different libs, toolkits,.. for their platform but who cares? It's important that there is a standard and based on the standard you can creat a perfect framework for your platform.

> I don't think Mono is behind MS, because Mono is not
> equal .Net. We don't have to care what .Net and MS
> are doing, we have C# and the CLI as ISO standard
> (much more than we have from java) and with these two
> things we can create a great framework for the whole
> UNIX platform even with some compatibility to
> windows. That's simply great and it's completely
> independent from what MS is doing with .Net.

This and your other paragraph (which I don't want to quote all) is of course totally right. But you forget reality here. The majority of C# and .NET coders and people will follow the path of Microsoft and not the path of Novell. The majority of Desktops are still found with Microsoft products, the amount of sold computers still ship with Microsoft products. People who play with serious money still want Microsoft products because products that don't cost money are worth nothing (some people still follow this opinion). So no matter how hard you try to manifest C# and MONO or how hard you want to make it a fine competitor to Microsoft - you can still be sure that people will follow MS. As many Web developers still (even now after years) refer to IE as the standards leading technology. You will have hard times to convince people to see it as difference.

> I don't think Mono is behind MS, because Mono is not equal .Net.

And that I don't understand. Why reengineer that technology in the first place? To create something 70% compatible? To be compared to MS technologies and always appear 30% worse than them?

The CLI is an ISO standard. Unfortunately, MS controls it. When they push a new version of the standard, guess who'll have all the tools needed to support it already finished? Mono lagging even more behind, Linux the even worse alternative in the great comparison charts.

> And based on this standard we can create a great platform for UNIX.

With a built-in vendor lock-in. We can't get too far away from MS otherwise we'll have that incompatible-with-everything fork, so we're forced to play the chase-MS game.