[Mono-list] Xamarin 2.0 concern

Sun Feb 24 04:59:18 UTC 2013

I don't really see it as a big issue; companies rebrand all the time.

The mono 'brand' is encumbered by a bunch of negative associations, largely
to do with it being abandoned by novell, discarded by linux, a second class
citizen to the 'official' windows C# runtime.

Abandoning the name to try to build a new brand isn't a new idea; building
a sustainable company when your core product has these associations
attached to it must be painful.

Did you read the hacker news responses to the new products?

Generally positive, but full of 'cross platform UI's don't work' comments.
Ouch. Yes, moonlight (and silverlight) were a waste of time and no one
liked or used them. ...but that's history now. That's why the new product
suite is all about creating native user interfaces for different platforms
and binding them to a common backend logic.

This seems to be a much more successful approach, but because of the legacy
of moonlight, people don't immediately appreciate that, and stay away.

There's a lot of really great work going on here, (never mind the
increasingly popular MonoGame drawing developers in). I think your comments
are a little unjustified.

It's just a brand name change.

All the code is up on github; it's not going anywhere.

~
Doug.

On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 10:54 PM, Dimitar Dobrev <dpldobrev at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Hello, all,
>
> I guess most of you see the announcement of Xamarin 2.0 as good news.
> However, I cannot help but feel the opposite. Let me tell you why:
>
> 1. At the  Xamarin 2.0 FAQ <http://xamarin.com/xamarin-2.0-faq>   it says:
>    Our new product brands are:
>
>     Xamarin.iOS (replaces MonoTouch)
>     Xamarin.Android (replaces Mono for Android)
>     Xamarin Studio, our new IDE (replaces MonoDevelop)
>
>    That is, the name "Mono" is now completely phased out of the Xamarin
> product line. At  the Xamarin Studio page <http://xamarin.com/studio>  ,
> MonoDevelop, upon which the Studio is based, is not mentioned once! Are you
> ashamed of MonoDevelop after you've been offering it to customers for
> years?
> At the  Xamarin main page <http://xamarin.com/>   Mono is mentioned only
> once at the very bottom, under the "Community" section - is Mono no longer
> part of Xamarin itself?
>    I think this is not the beginning but rather the end of a process that
> started with the renaming of MonoMac to Xamarin.Mac (and please don't tell
> me "MonoMac is our community-supported version" because I haven't heard
> about it since). Then was the renaming of YOUR MonoSpace conference to
> MonkeySpace and the explanation was really ridiculous - "bigger scope...
> open source .NET development in general" (Miguel de Icaza at that very same
> "Monkey"Space conference). What bigger scope? .NET runs only on Windows, be
> it desktop or phone, while Mono runs on tens of platforms, including
> Windows. Yes, I do understand it's about "the scope of the community" but
> how broader is that community since the only significant piece of .NET
> missing in Mono is WPF?
>    Mono is the core of your company, both historically and at present,
> since
> all of your products are based on it. And you are removing its name from
> anywhere it's mentioned. I don't see this as justified even for marketing
> reasons because if people know about you, it's because of Mono. That is,
> "Mono" is your marketing message. If you do reply to this mail, I'd really
> like to hear something a little deeper that "The change of our product
> names
> does not mean we are abandoning Mono, we are going to support it just as
> before". We all know how this works out: the name is abandoned, time
> passes,
> many current users forget about it, new users do not learn it at all, and
> after a little more time the project itself is abandoned. This kind of
> tactics reminds me of a very specific company which leads me to:
> 2.  "Microsoft Joins Xamarin Evolve 2013 as Sole Platinum Sponsor"
> <
> http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-joins-xamarin-evolve-2013-as-sole-platinum-sponsor/
> >
> - I believe Microsoft have proven time and time again that they are enemies
> of Mono in particular and of open source in general. I do not want to quote
> a large part of the web on that but let me say a few words just about Mono.
>    Miguel, you may remember you said "Microsoft as a company are not
> open-source-friendly" yourself at FOSDEM at the beginning of 2011. You may
> also remember how you at the same conference you told the story how you
> showed your C# REPL to Microsoft just before PDC 2008 and once they saw
> that, they changed their program and rushed their C# REPL with the only
> intent of showing it before you did. The proof that they didn't have a
> working product back then (while you did) lies in the simple fact that now,
> 5 (five!) years later Microsoft still do not have a working version (Roslyn
> is still a CTP and nobody knows when it's going to be released). While at
> the same time your C# REPL has been constantly evolving up to the point
> that
> NRefactory is based upon it. You may also remember that just a few months
> later that same 2011 the whole Mono team was ousted when Novell was bought
> my Attachmate - and its patents sold to a consortium of technology
> companies
> led by Microsoft (CPTN Holdings). For last I'd like to return to MonoSpace
> and the fact that a little before the renaming in the organization were
> involved a number of Microsoft employees, such as Scott Hanselman, and I
> don't believe they have nothing to do with the erasure of "Mono".
>
>    I've been a Mono user for years and I'd really like for it to continue
> to
> flourish. It's just that I don't see this happening if everything goes on
> like that. I hope there will be positive change, it's not nearly late for
> it.
>
>    Regards,
>    Dimitar Dobrev
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://mono.1490590.n4.nabble.com/Xamarin-2-0-concern-tp4658722.html
> Sent from the Mono - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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