[Mono-list] No more Novell support?

Miguel de Icaza miguel at ximian.com
Sun Nov 6 13:11:17 EST 2005


Hello,

> It's seems that no one has yet commented on that issue here, but as I 
> far as I know Novell cuts off it's budget and mostly in Mono and 
> Evolution projects support.

Novell did cut parts of Mono budget, which means that we will not be
able to take on as many things as we had hoped we would and certain
features will probably have to be rescheduled.  

> There were even further rumours about abandoning Suse and Desktop Linux 
> development, but they have denied it and admitted only the 
> Evolution/Mono part.

I can not speak for Evolution, but the Mono bits are incorrect.

> Will mono keep it's course even with no Novell funds?

Mono will continue to be developed by Novell, today there are seven
Novell products and projects using Mono.  These projects and products
are helping Novell Linux to have more interesting features than other
Linux distributions.

And as you can imagine Mono is a gateway to bring applications that were
originally only targeted to run on Windows to run on Linux.  It is part
of our strategy to make Linux more interesting to developers and users.

Independently of our cuts, we are discussing how to focus our Mono
efforts.  The situation is more or less like this: we are waiting on
Windows.Forms to be done to ship Mono 1.2.  But for assorted reasons
Windows.Forms has taken more time that we wanted so pieces of Mono that
were scheduled to be launched with Mono 1.4/2.0 are already completed.

So the question is whether the release plans that called for Mono 1.2
being the Windows.Forms release make sense given that so much has been
completed in parallel from other releases.

You might have noticed the "To split or not to split" discussion on
mono-devel-list, and this has to do with scheduling Mono releases: there
are many advances in the core of Mono that are useful independently of
Windows.Forms being complete, and the debate is: how do we most
effectively ship this software.

In any case, you are welcome to join us in accelerating the features in
Mono.

Miguel.


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