Several members of the open-source development community are working to ensure that Microsoft’s .Net strategy, which will offer a myriad of online services in an effort to boost Microsoft’s standing on the Internet, will not be available to Microsoft’s customers only. Ximian, the company chiefly responsible for the Gnome user interface for Linux, today announced the Mono project, whose goals are similar to that of .Net. “We’re not about cloning systems for the sake of cloning; we’re about making sure that the future of computing doesn’t implode around a monopoly,” explained Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat, the world’s most popular Linux distribution.