[Mono-list] Xamarin 2.0 concern

[Dimitar Dobrev]

    Doug,

    Companies do rebrand but as I've outlined, in this case rebranding
doesn't make sense. The reasons it doesn't make sense have to do with your
negative associations. 
    "Discarded by Linux" - for years Ubuntu, the most popular Linux
distribution, had had Mono applications (and of course, Mono itself)
preinstalled. Even after they removed these (as far as I know, mostly
because of the applications themselves and not because of their Mono
dependencies) they continued adding the latest stable Mono to their
distribution channels so that anyone can easily install it. And this is just
Ubuntu, about which I know for sure, while I think that other distributions
such as Debian do that too. I think what you mean by "discarded" is some
Linux people who condemn Mono just because its specification was initially
created by Microsoft. But there will always be such people (just like there
will always be people who think that anything above C is bloated) and I am
certain the Mono team has learned in ten years that they cannot be pleased
anyway. About those people who dislike Mono but would change their mind -
well, such a "rebranding" will only increase their dislike, not the other
way around.
    "Second class citizen" - in many ways the same; some people who repeat
this without thinking. People, who do not understand that Mono actually
lacks few, and non-crucial pieces; who do not understand that almost no
projects use ALL of .NET; who cannot see other GUI tool-kits besides WPF.
Most of these people are again a group that would repeat the same no matter
what.
    "abandoned by Novell" - this point makes sense and I don't feel like
arguing; but as you've already seen I've mentioned who had a hand in that
abandonment.
    Furthermore, even if I hadn't argued about these negative associations
what about the positive ones? That because of Mono, developers can run their
both existing and new code on Linux, OS X, iOS, Android? You do realise that
changing a name does not remove only the negative associations, it removes
ALL of them. This is exactly what I meant by saying ""Mono" is your
marketing message". Finally, about the legacy of Moonlight being a problem.
First of all, I doubt that many people have even heard of it, and second of
all, Moonlight, while a bit behind at the time, was only abandoned because
Silverlight itself was abandoned. In case Moonlight had any negative impact,
let me add that back when Microsoft and Novell signed the Moonlight deal,
Microsoft imposed the condition that the Mono team should first write
Silverlight 1.0 - the version with JavaScript and XAML - an absolutely
useless piece of software, thus only wasting Mono developers' time.
    About the code on github - I don't even understand why you wrote that. I
know it's there, I know it wont' be removed. What I'm worried about is, in
the light of these events, for how long it's going to be updated.



    Stifu,

    Besides all said above, I would argue a bit further on these names.
Clarity - "for Android" could not be clearer, even the old "Monodroid" was
clear enough to me; "Touch" -yes, a bit vague but at the time MonoTouch was
initially released there was only one widely distributed touch platform.
About consistency - "Mono" is present in both names, I cannot see how more
consistent it can get. Anyway, I'm not saying they should've necessarily
kept these names, I'm saying they should've kept "Mono" in them.



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