[Mono-dev] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Ongoing Mono development / Mono roadmap

Alex J Lennon ajlennon at dynamicdevices.co.uk
Wed Apr 9 21:17:46 UTC 2014


On 09/04/2014 22:00, Robert Jordan wrote:
> Were you living under a stone the past couple of years? :D
>

Just trying to understand the realities Robert :-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.
>

A key component of what I was told toay is that Xamarin are unable to
work on Mono due to contractual obligations to Attachmate. As a
result they are (I am told) abandoning Mono and doing something
else which is the (presumably) VM underneath the Xamarin tooling.

I guess I'm looking for confirmation that either this is true, or
is some strange new form of FUD :) This comes from a discussion which
was originally about Microsoft open sourcing (ish, bits of) .Net.

I care, because I think Mono is pretty fantastic, it allows me to retarget
products my business creates to embedded devices running Linux, and
I want to see it continue and grow. If the "death" of Mono were to be a
reality I would need to rethink some objectives.

Which is why I asked you guys, because I figure if anybody can give me
a categorical answer then it is the developers...


> 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
>>
>
>
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>

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