Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.
In some cases we've been building tools that are specific to Linux for the desktop, and they only work on Linux, but I see two major projects that are wildly, wildly successful: Mozilla and OpenOffice, and those two programs are cross platform.
The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.
After releasing Mono 1.0, we started work on a new edition of Mono that will be released later in the year.
In addition to that, Mono has produced a very large set of extra libraries.
We all love Linux, but it's also a fact that some people might not be able to migrate.
