[Mono-dev] Ongoing Mono development / Mono roadmap

[Alex J Lennon]

Hi,

I became involved in a conversation today on LinkedIn in which a
commentator was telling me Mono is "dead", due to contractual
constraints imposed on Xamarin by the "legal owners" of Mono, Attachmate.

A snippet of the ensuing conversation follows,

"In July 2011, however, Novell - now a subsidiary of Attachmate - and
Xamarin announced that Novell had granted a perpetual license for Mono,
MonoTouch and Mono for Android to Xamarin, which formally and legally
took official stewardship of the project."

It also says as follows: " ...the future of the project was questioned,
since MonoTouch and Mono for Android would now be in direct competition
with the existing commercial offerings owned by Attachmate. It was not
known at the time how Xamarin would prove they had not illegally used
technologies previously developed when they were employed by Novell for
the same work".

In the Mono project website (www.mono-project.com), you have three main
offerings, Mono, Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android, and you can find a
link (at the bottom left corner of the page) to Xamarin's website.

It is clear that this is a strategy by Xamarin to offer MonoTouch
developers a migration path to Xamarin tools, and not much more than that.

To be able to woo Mono developers to Xamarin, Novell (Attachmate) and
Xamarin cut this deal, because it is of mutual convenience to the two of
them.

But from any real perspective of active development of the platform,
Mono is dead".

...

This doesn't square at all for me with the near-monthly releases I've
been seeing with functional enhancements I've been needing, such as ARM
hardfp (great work, thanks).

Would anybody care to comment on whether there's a kernel of truth here
or what the roadmap for Mono development currently is?

Thanks,

Alex