[Mono-list] future of Mono

[jmalcolm]

ArmchairBronco wrote:
> 
> Matthew, I'm curious why you think you can't use MonoTouch now. I'm still
> operating under the assumption that MonoTouch will still be a viable
> solution for me. I'm sure that that there will be bumps in the road, and
> there may be some issues that I can't work around, but my view is that
> "the community" at large will still be able to help us find solutions to a
> lot of issues.
> 
> I just dropped $399 a few hours ago, and my view is that if Attachmate or
> Novell or whoever is willing to take my money TODAY then the bits I paid
> for are still usable.  Years and years ago, I was a devoted user of
> HomeSite.  I cried when Macromedia bought them, and sure enough, that was
> it for new upgrades to HomeSite, but that old version still lasted for
> many years before I finally retired it from daily use. I'm hoping to get
> at least a year out of MonoTouch before it's truly "obsolete".
> 
> Or am I just being overly optimistic or naive?
> 

I am with you. MonoTouch is a polished product now. Even without another
update, it is easily worth the license fee ($399) to be able to use C#
instead of Objective-C for the next year.

Xamarin says that their upcoming product will work with my MonoTouch
code-base so my effort is not wasted. I will have a path forward. If it
really takes less than six months for the Xamarin product to arrive, I am
betting that I can transition to it before any major issues appear (like
support for iOS 5 or something).

Mono for Android is not as mature unfortunately. I am not as happy relying
on it to create shipping applications. Luckily for me, I have have not
created anything significant with it yet. In the end, I decided to stick
with it as it will likely take me almost as long to start launching real
apps as it will for Xamarin to write a replacement product. I am going to
use it mostly for internal projects for now.

I guess it all comes down to how confident you are that Xamarin will pull
off nice products to transition to within a reasonable time frame. I
personally have confidence in them but others might assess the situation
differently.

For a few days there, I just wanted to be sure that Novell did not get my
money. Then I realised that penalising my company in an attempt to punish
Novell just made no sense. Who cares about them? They will be dead to me
soon enough. In the meantime, I want to be able to use the best tools
available.

I also had to wrestle with the idea of buying licenses now that I would have
to replace with Xamarin products later. Well, the Novell products only
included updates for one year as it was. I would likely have been paying to
upgrade them sometime after that anyway. Moving to the Xamarin products when
they are ready just means doing this 4-8 months from now instead. The
productivity gains (and joy) of being able to use C# in the meantime is more
than worth the money (for me at least).

Quick question(s)...

If you were one of the ex-Novell employees that got sacked by Attachmate,
how motivated would you be the kick their ass in the marketplace? If you
felt that your vision was constrained by "big company issues" at Novell, how
excited would you be now to run with your ideas?

The Mono team is talented, experienced, and driven. If I think about how
much value I am going to get out of these products in the next few years, it
feels like I am better off now than I was with the team all at Novell. Have
a some delay in before "upgraded" versions are available and/or having to
invest slightly more to get them seems completely worth it.

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