Fspot is a Mono programme. There are replacements in GNOME for most Mono
programmes, but Fspot is the one that most people point to as having no
GNOME equivalent, ie. written in GTK, which is why I recommended DigiKam,
although it is QT4 (KDE) and not GTK (GNOME).

See the list of Mono prgrammes here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)

If you try to remove Mono from GNOME, it will want to remove: Tomboy, Fspot,
GNOME Do, Beagle, Banshee and Miune. There are equivalents for everything
but Fspot. Gnote for Tomboy (although Tomboy developers see the problem and
are apparently porting it from Mono to GTK) for example. My problem is that
Canonical is in fact thinking of increasing Mono content rather than
eliminating it as Debian and Fedora are. They are considering including
Banshee and eliminating RhythmBox in Karmic Koala.

My opinion (and that of many peiople including the developers of Fedora and
Debian) is that if you respect FOSS then you should steer clear of Mono and
all programmes that are written in it, no matter how good they are, because
its license is not unecumbered, which is the essence of free (as in freedom)
software. At best it is doubtful until such time as Microsoft clears up its
status (and it is not in their best interest to do so as it keeps us off
guard and turned on ourselves). It is tainted goods as things stand.

Unfortunately GNOME does not see it this way nor does Canonical. But I
should point out that the developer of Mono, Miguel de Icaza, had a conflict
of interest in this. He is paid by Novell and was a big time developer of
GNOME at the same time. It got into GNOME through him and now GNOME si
trying to distance itself from both. They are looking at the benefits of
having .Net developers work in open source at not at the ramifications that
this could have down the road when Microsoft once again says that we are
infringing on their patents.

Everyone is free as usual to make up his or her own mind but you need to
know that Mono is steeped in controversy and that it has its share of
supporters and detractors. I feel strongly enough that I will leave Ubuntu
if they continue down this path because it is not in the best interests of
open source to give Microsoft leverage to use against us at a time of their
choosing.