[Mono-dev] Mono's future

[James Mansion]

On Sat, 09 Jul 2011 21:04:10 +0100, Απόστολος Συρόπουλος  
<asyropoulos123 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> When I am talking about Solaris, I am in fact about OpenIndiana/Illumos.
> I don't care about Oracle Solaris!

I suspect that most of us with any history of using Solaris in production
datacentres have precisely the opposite concern.  Though I've been happy
to run OpenSolaris at home and am considering it for NAS.

> I am not sure what this has to do with the future of mono and its  
> support of
> OpenSolaris...

Well, the issue was 'Solaris'.  Whether or not its worth regarding it as
a tier 1 or tier 2 platform is really a question for people who care
whether mono makes any headway in corporate dev environments (big
ones, not SMEs) where Java has seen massive adoption. Binary compatibility
has always been a Solaris strength, and currently at least it doesn't
make sense to distinguish between them.  I think there's a good
chance for Mono to make some headway if it can show a way to reuse
code from client system dev on servers - but it has to run on the servers
first, and that means Red Hat and Solaris, and AIX, HP-UX and
any-other-Linux next (even SUSE) - at least in the businesses I've
worked in recently.  And to be honest I think it would need
a professional service organisation - I'm a bit surprised that Xamarin
haven't looked at splitting the business in two if there really is
demand.

I've never felt I could realistically propose Mono as a server side
technology, even if we have a commitment to native CLR desktop delivery.

I think its a shame.

And I've never seen Gnome on anyone's CV - whatever Gnome devs do, it
isn't (move into) banking.  Still, early days - let's hope the push
for real product can yield some real revenue for Xamarin, and things
settle down.

James