questions about MONO

I understand that Linden Lab is planning a move to MONO CLI as the virtual machine which will handle the running of scripts in SL objects. MONO will replace the existing, Linden developed, virtual machine and provide advantages of speed and flexibility.

http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_General
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm

I listened to an excellent presentation by Babbage Linden and Cory Linden, at Lang.net 2006, where they outlined the advantages of MONO for SL scripting. Videos of the talk here:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/4/1/94138e2a-d9dc-435a-9240-bcd985bf5bd7/Jim-Cory-SecondLife.wmv

My question is, why MONO? Were other VM technologies considered? What were the deciding factors in MONO's favor?

I understand that MONO is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET technology. Microsoft's .NET technology is, itself, a proprietary "reimplementation" of SUN's JAVA. Was JAVA JVM considered as a VM for SL?

According to some developers, MONO is a risky technological bet. So far, Microsoft has allowed MONO development to continue, but Microsoft could claim infringement at any time and MONO development could be stalled.

MONO technology is now owned by NOVELL. NOVELL acquired MONO, along with MONO's previous developer, Ximian, in 2003. Being backed by NOVELL would seem to insure MONO's continued development. However, NOVELL's position seems to be that NOVELL will remove any parts of MONO that Microsoft deems "infringing" and that MONO users will just have to "work around" the loss:
http://news.com.com/More+than+an+open-source+curiosity/2008-7344_3-5271084.html?tag=nefd.lede

Forwarding this to Babbage, our "Mono Master", of course.

Mono was considered alongside Java for Second Life: they both provide as much performance as possible while still providing sandboxes that allow the execution of untrusted code and support mainstream, widely used languages and framework libraries.

The CLI standards that Mono is based on are slightly more advanced than Java's VM, it is designed as a target for multiple languages which made writing an LSL to CLI compiler easier and Mono is a fully open source project, which Java wasn't at the time we were looking at VMs.

OTOH Java is a more mature technology and has automatic class unloading which would have avoided one of the hacks we had to use to integrate Mono. Java and .NET really are very similar platforms at this point and there is very little to choose between them.

The patent FUD surrounding Mono shouldn't effect our use of Mono in Second Life which primarily leverages the CLI standards implemented by Mono, not the Mono reimplementations of the Microsoft Windows Forms stack.

Microsoft are also very excited by our use of Mono as it promotes the .NET platform, so if anything they are more likely to help than hinder our integration of Mono.