[Mono-dev] Ongoing Mono development / Mono roadmap

[Robert Jordan]

Were you living under a stone the past couple of years? :D

You're mixing up Mono & MonoTouch like they were the same
and don't seem to understand how these technologies
are interwoven.

Mono is an Open Source .NET implementation, while MonoTouch
(now Xamarin.iOS) is a spin-off with a lot of enhancements
targeted to mobile development. But at its core, it's still
Mono and its BCL.

Mono's death, as you put it, would imply that Xamarin were
sooner or later out of business. It doesn't look so.

The truth is rather that *parts* of the Mono framework became
less important for Xamarin, as they are solely focused on mobile
nowadays.

Which parts these are, should be too hard to figure out.

Robert


On 09.04.2014 21:36, Alex J Lennon wrote:
> 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
>