Well, this is surprising isn't it? Microsoft are handing over the Mono Project to the Wine developers with a thank you note.
What is it? Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime.
Posted on the Mono website, along with a GitHub post, Microsoft's Jeff Schwartz announced:
The Mono Project (mono/mono) (‘original mono’) has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.
The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024.
We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono · GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.
Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork.
We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us.
Thank you to all the Mono developers!
Not only have Microsoft done a seemingly pretty good thing here, their acknowledgement of the Wine team and their work is also really nice to see.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
DryPapHmrBro Aug 27
Nateman1000 Aug 27
How will Wine handle it, will they pull in changes from .NET's fork back into Mono?
Quoting: Nateman1000Microsoft trusting an important project to none other than WINE?!?!?On the other hand he makes it very clear that it is outdated and everyone should switch to their modern fork. So yeah…
Mountain Man Aug 27
Quoting: Mountain ManSo Microsoft is 100% open sourcing the code with no strings attached?
It was always open source. They just bought the company who created* and maintained, it, moved the devs over to their own fork and closed down the original, graciously allowing the wine team to maintain their own fork of the old code, as if they needed a permission, lol. It's a good PR move (also for Wine, mind you) but nothing else.
(*) actually it seems it changed hands a few times, I confused Ximian with Xamarin
Last edited by pb on 27 August 2024 at 6:51 pm UTC
Quoting: KlaasQuoting: Nateman1000Microsoft trusting an important project to none other than WINE?!?!?On the other hand he makes it very clear that it is outdated and everyone should switch to their modern fork. So yeah…
Yup. It sounds a lot like "let's get rid of old useless code we would have otherwise unceremoniously discarded by offloading it onto the FOSS community".
That way it sounds like they are being good and donating, instead of having to announce its closure and making it sound like being acquired killed the project.
Last edited by Aeder on 27 August 2024 at 7:12 pm UTC
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