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

Wed Apr 9 21:27:52 UTC 2014

If you take a look at the live repository for Mono, you can see that Xamarin employees regularly update the source code (there are changes from 2 hours ago).  That places the statement that "Xamarin are unable to work on Mono" clearly into the FUD column.

Mono is actively being fixed and improved by Xamarin and others.

-Chris

From: mono-devel-list-bounces at lists.ximian.com [mailto:mono-devel-list-bounces at lists.ximian.com] On Behalf Of Alex J Lennon
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2014 4:18 PM
To: mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
Subject: Re: [Mono-dev] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Ongoing Mono development / Mono roadmap

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<http://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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