Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

Now WINE no longer needs to guess and reverse engineer Mono related code, saving them time and money.

I don't follow. Mono is FOSS and always has been.


Last edited by Thad on 28 August 2024 at 2:53 pm UTC

Kind of feels like Mono is a corpse they are graciously allowing the Wine people to bury for them.

But... WINE has put a lot of effort over the years into supporting programs for old defunct Windows releases. Microsoft no longer needs it, and they're recommending all new code to use their modern fork, but these are like receiving the exam answers ahead of time. Now WINE no longer needs to guess and reverse engineer Mono related code, saving them time and money.

But Mono was already open source. It started as an open source thing to try to deal with the problem that was MS' .Net, which originated basically as a platform to exclude Linux. So I don't see why WINE would have needed to do any of that. MS are just saying "We have no more use for it, how about you guys maintain it?"

Kind of feels like Mono is a corpse they are graciously allowing the Wine people to bury for them.

That's the strange thing.
Mono is no corpse.
Unity uses it for their game engine.
Android uses it for compatibility.
Basically anyone who isn't Microsoft uses it if they want to participate in the Microsoft dominated dotnet space.

Mm, I was suspicious of that press release, but perhaps not nearly suspicious enough. So if their claim that everyone is/will be using their fork of Mono rather than the main version they're asking WINE to maintain is false, then . . . I dunno. It's not like they can force the WINE people to maintain it, or would have been able to stop them from maintaining a fork if they wanted to. It all seems kind of amicable (assuming the WINE people are even aware this is happening), but at the same time like nothing much is actually going on.

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.

I so if I get this correct. Mono and .NET are open source and MS maintains both. MS has a modern fork of Mono runtime within .NET which they will push devs to use. The original Mono has been given to WINE for compatibility with older programs.

Kind of feels like Mono is a corpse they are graciously allowing the Wine people to bury for them.

But... WINE has put a lot of effort over the years into supporting programs for old defunct Windows releases. Microsoft no longer needs it, and they're recommending all new code to use their modern fork, but these are like receiving the exam answers ahead of time. Now WINE no longer needs to guess and reverse engineer Mono related code, saving them time and money.

But Mono was already open source. It started as an open source thing to try to deal with the problem that was MS' .Net, which originated basically as a platform to exclude Linux. So I don't see why WINE would have needed to do any of that. MS are just saying "We have no more use for it, how about you guys maintain it?"

But how much of that could WINE use without the Mono project keeping an open source license? Since WINE would redistribute Mono with installations, possibly modifying it as necessary, it seems to me like they'd be in a delicate position. Sure it's open for us but we're protected by "personal use".

Lot's of misunderstanding of the modern situation of DotNet and MS here, so I wanted to chime in as both a FOSS enthuasiast and someone who uses DotNet for work.

First of all, Microsoft is not the same anymore: their cashcows are Office365, Azure and ChatGPT now, not Windows. This had a big impact on DotNet: where it first was a Windows only platform to lure developers into the Windows (server) ecosystem, DotNet is now a vehicle to lower the barrier to use Azure. And just to be clear: yes it is fully open source, no strings attached, just like most other programming languages. Getting developers on Azure is not done through lock-in: they just make really good Azure integrations. A part of this new stragety, is that they support Linux as a first class _runtime_ citizen now, because developers like running their servers in Linux. Hence, the new DotNet from version 6 forward (which is the fork they are talking about) has true full cross-platform runtime support. The stance towards desktop Linux has changed from actively hostile to ambivalent/slightly interested. Microsoft wants to move away from Visual Studio to VS-Code, but it is simply a lot of work with medium priority. This of course is good for Linux, since VS Code is also cross platform. I have developed some projects on Linux, and it is doable, just not perfect yet, but I believe they will get there. Again: anything that gets developers on Azure is a win.

Mono was from before DotNet 6 and is being fased out in favour of the new DotNet (which is just plain better, even on Linux). Unity indeed still uses it, but wants to move away from it in the end.

So is this good or bad? I think this is more a suggestion of goodwill to the WINE devs, since in absolute terms, this doesn't really matter much. But a good gesture is still good in my book.

Also: I don't really like the way some people draw modern Microsoft as the arch enemy of Linux. This was true in the past, but times have changed and, most importantly, business incentives have changed. Corporations aren't people, just follow the money.

Also: I don't really like the way some people draw modern Microsoft as the arch enemy of Linux.

Maybe because of the recent breaking of most of the Linux dual boot due to a windows update.
Compagny as a whole are friendlier with Linux, still no company (and no institution as well) is as adversial to Linux than Microsoft, even as a big chunk of their revenue come from Linux adjacent products.

Kind of feels like Mono is a corpse they are graciously allowing the Wine people to bury for them.

But... WINE has put a lot of effort over the years into supporting programs for old defunct Windows releases. Microsoft no longer needs it, and they're recommending all new code to use their modern fork, but these are like receiving the exam answers ahead of time. Now WINE no longer needs to guess and reverse engineer Mono related code, saving them time and money.

But Mono was already open source. It started as an open source thing to try to deal with the problem that was MS' .Net, which originated basically as a platform to exclude Linux. So I don't see why WINE would have needed to do any of that. MS are just saying "We have no more use for it, how about you guys maintain it?"

But how much of that could WINE use without the Mono project keeping an open source license? Since WINE would redistribute Mono with installations, possibly modifying it as necessary, it seems to me like they'd be in a delicate position. Sure it's open for us but we're protected by "personal use".

Microsoft did the opposite, they re-licensed Mono as MIT instead of GPL (worse for software freedom, but better for people wanting to fork it). Mono is fully open-source, it could be forked at any time, and in fact most other .NET stuff is also open source these days and supports Linux and all. Microsoft long ago realized that, like Google, they can keep lots of control without draconian licenses that scare people off.

What they gave was control over the upstream, the "name", so that the WineHQ people don't need to fork it and then promote their fork to everyone: "hey mono is dead, so we made this fork which is a successor to mono, and you might not know us but we are the real deal". Microsoft handed them the project and now they are the "real" mono. Does this matter? Idk.

Don't fool yourselves, the new .NET doesn't have UI support that what's needed for wine. No proper winforms or WPF for that matter. Also, the new UI framework MAUI quietly dropped linux support and has no plans at all to have it done, so .NET for linux is server-side only officially unless you build a separate UI for the app using a thirdy-party framework

In my case mono have huge improvements in last years, various launchers begin work like this:

Kind of feels like Mono is a corpse they are graciously allowing the Wine people to bury for them.

That's the strange thing.
Mono is no corpse.
Unity uses it for their game engine.
Android uses it for compatibility.
Basically anyone who isn't Microsoft uses it if they want to participate in the Microsoft dominated dotnet space.

Mm, I was suspicious of that press release, but perhaps not nearly suspicious enough. So if their claim that everyone is/will be using their fork of Mono rather than the main version they're asking WINE to maintain is false, then . . . I dunno. It's not like they can force the WINE people to maintain it, or would have been able to stop them from maintaining a fork if they wanted to. It all seems kind of amicable (assuming the WINE people are even aware this is happening), but at the same time like nothing much is actually going on.

I assure you they do know.
The press release mentions that wine's fork Wine-mono will become Mono.
This is handing over a trademark and possibly a signing key.
The WINE people know about this and potentially extracted concessions from Microsoft of it.

Don't use anything from M$ if you plan on needing it in the near future, including .net.

RIP
Silverlight
Windows Phone / Nokia
Cortana
Zune
Groove
Kinect
ETC..


Last edited by TightRope on 28 August 2024 at 7:18 pm UTC

Maybe this will lead to more applications that rely on NET to work. In particular all those mod managers that hate working under WINE.

Maybe this will lead to more applications that rely on NET to work. In particular all those mod managers that hate working under WINE.

Odd. I have no problems running Mod Organizer 2 with Fallout: New Vegas under Wine-GE. It's an older version, mind you. In fact, I have more problems running it under native Windows on the same laptop.

Come to think of it, does MO2 need .NET?

Come to think of it, does MO2 need .NET?

There are other mod managers that have issues such as those for dragon age or mech warrior and several others. Also there are tools like xedit that still have odd behaviour issues under Wine and many other tools. Just loose bits of NET that aren't being handled right.

timeo danaos et dona ferentes

Bazwokkels.
I just happened to look up the Mono project under Wine and now I see how big a thing this actually is.
The wine people now control Mono main and this patent pledge remains.
The wine project bought itself some minimal protection against microsoft patent strikes.
They've now a part of their project they can safely update without threading on patented toes.
I'm currently not aware if they would be allowed to add lgplv2 code to mono, but at least they can dodge microsoft patents.

Edit: I read the patent pledge a little better and it doesn't apply to new stuff(or more accurately to things not written by xamarin and/or microsoft.)


Last edited by LoudTechie on 9 September 2024 at 5:07 am UTC

M$ is just cheating to get its reputation, because mono is originally open source, and the optimized wine-mono is better than mono. Therefore, M$’s donation to wine has not actually contributed to the Linux world, but it looks like M$ has further contributed to Linux.