GNOME 2.18 released

Mono may be a political problem for some users of Gnome, but as far as I can tell it's not a problem for the people who decide what goes into a Gnome release.

That's not really a fair characterization. First, it was a difficult compromise situation (read the official announcement for the details). Second, Tomboy was accepted into GNOME before the MS/Novell deal; it is not new to the GNOME 2.18 release. Many of those who were originally in favor of accepting new applications even if it meant a dependency on Mono, or that were straddling the fence on that hot topic, have changed their opinion considerably since that deal. True, Tomboy hasn't been kicked back out of the desktop release (yet?) -- it's quite rare for anything ever to be kicked out once in -- but I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't yet been proposed.