What this means for MonoDevelop? Will it stagnate and die, or florish with fresh water from Microsoft's wells? What will be THE tool to develop for/on Linux?
C
Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
131–140 of 405 posts
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would MS want to extinguish a successful technology that they just bought?
Embrace a new technology Extend with proprietary functionality Extinguish the competition
You make absolutely no sense.
The competition for .Net isn't Xamarin. It's the Java platform.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#133For once, I see an acquisition that might actually work! There must have been a blue moon. Satya Nadella is a breath of fresh air. I don't say that very often about top-level management (not that my opinion is all that important), I suspect if I was employed by Microsoft I'd feel proud of working there.
Also part of the deal with him running the place was to have Bill Gates return and spend a third of his time at Microsoft. Bill Gates has changed a lot over the years. I'm really curious how much of this change he (Gates) has played a part in.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#134This has been so obviously coming for several years. I'm surprised it took them this long.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes indeed, right now Xamarin is very very buggy and also pretty slow. I think the software will get MUCH better if the teams at Microsoft will start working on it.
Xamarin actually works quite well. Microsoft will definitely bring in more quality as they have huge amounts of resources not only in cash but in talented people. This news is important because it solidifies the future of the .Net ecosystem in iOS, OSX, Android, Linux and Windows. The Xamarin team has been doing a great job, but I am pretty sure that with Microsoft backing them they'll do a way better job.
"Works quite well" is a phrase I've never used with Xamarin. I stopped using it about a year ago for two reasons: (1) _every_single_release_ would break my apps and would then require spending inordinate amounts of time trying to get things building again, and (2) I could no longer justify paying for the professional edition just to be able to use Visual Studio on my hobby projects.
I am very much hoping that both of these issues are addressed with this acquisition, and like many, I have been holding out for a while now hoping this would happen.
EDIT: pjmlp, can't reply to your comment directly: You are talking about the Indie edition, with which you cannot use Visual Studio. Using Visual Studio requires the professional edition, at $999/platform/year. Even with the discount they gave me, the thousands of dollars I spent just to do hobby projects was a mistake.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense. The last 5 years show it's a whole new Microsoft. Disclaimer: I have been one of the ones pushing the last 5 years to make that statement true. ;)
I look forward to that. However, after 20 years of bad behavior, it's not unfair to be guarded for a long time after that. Does cancer relapse? Does alcoholism relapse? How about the politics of Russia? How long did democracy last? I applaud your efforts. The road is yet long.
EEE only works if you're a monopolist. Microsoft in 2016 is so far from being a monopolist that they can't even see monopoly from where they are. Xamarin is just another tool, so it's not clear what Microsoft would gain from extinguishing it.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#137Xamarin bought by Microsoft two days after Skype for Linux can't join calls by new clients. Oh yeah. The future is bright. Just not for the Linux desktop pieces of Mono.
Indeed. When you get out of your small "coder" box and into the enterprise layer where the negotiations and implementations are happening you will know nothing has changed in the way Microsoft is doing business. Their TAM and KAM layer is exactly the same as the use to be. They are just moving the layers for vendor lock-in now.
What are TAM and KAM? Surprisingly, not google-trivial.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#138A core group of these people (in the orbit of Miguel/Nat) have been plugging away for like two decades on solving programs through building software. From mc, to GNOME, to Ximian, to Mono, to Xamarian.
It was a lot of hard work and dedication and, above all, constant shipping. Good for them.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#139How much? I know it's undisclosed but it would be very interesting. Hopefully someone leaks it. The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F*#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built. I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount - especially with the tech industry down…
Open sourcing the compiler, CoreCLR, and JIT made Xamarin's life easier, not harder.
Acquiring Xamarin is just acknowledging that Windows Phone is DOA and their best shot at monetizing the mobile world is providing backend hosting/services and developer tools. That's not a secret - that's their publicly announced strategy.
I'd expect all the Xamarin tools to be built-in to VS going forward. One VS/MSDN subscription gets you everything and the tools will make it trivially easy to host on Azure.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Desktop Linux was, is, and will probably always be a niche thing. And if the open source community is so great, as some of its proponents argue, let them build their own Skype. The non desktop pieces of Mono should be getting lots of improvements, though.
"if the open source community is so great" if.. i dont see how they can be an if .. it is 100% absolutely great .. with all the great FOSS projects around, how much more evidence do you need
It's because I've been around for a while.
The idea, and failed promise, of FOSS wasn't that there will be many "great FOSS projects around", it was that it will win the desktop (and not just as some FOSS released by some corporate behemoth, but by community -bazaar- FOSS projects).
That, it never did.
And in fact, in all those years, they've failed to even better Photoshop (Gimp is still far behind), MS Office (Open/Libre Office and co), etc and other such basics. Heck, compare GTK/Gnome's latest APIs to something like Cocoa (and even more so with Swift) and weep.
And then SaaS used server-side FOSS to kill the free part behind the service providers server farms. They can use all the FOSS goodies they like, and nobody gets to see their code or change it.