I started this article as a comment to http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1380&blogid=14
I see more comments suggesting Mono was the same as Wine. From a mere technical point of view that even may be right, but beyond a mere technical view it gets absurd.
So let me think a little how it would be, if this were true.
If Mono was like Wine, it would be only used to port Windows software to GNU/Linux. GTK# would never have been written then. I would have nothing against that.
On the other hand, if Wine was treated like Mono: GNU/Linux distributions would start to include EXE files which need Wine to run and GNU/Linux developers would be invited to write their programs for Wine, because… well, whatever. Then I would also start to complain about that.
BTW. there are actually much more programs, that need Wine to run, than there are programs that need Mono to run. The difference is in how they are treated by distributions, even if you leave out the huge amount of nonfree programs; Sourceforge has more then 20000 Free Software applications, that need the Win32-API.
Well, if the programs are Free Software and they work with Wine, I even would not argue against that. But what I really dislike is to invite developers to write their programs for the Windows API, because it is supposedly oh so supperior. And that's exactly what the Mono proponents do.