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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

mono-project.com

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Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#171
post #161

Yet another piece of Xamarin/Mono that falls down. No wonder Miguel de Icaza is now focused on Swift, Godot and Apple's ecosystem, all the promises done at Xamarin acquisition time are gone now. Mono Develop killed, after being renamed into VS4Mac, gone through a rewrite, only to be killed shortly after the rewrite reached 1.0. Xamarin.Forms rewriten into MAUI, with incompatible APIs. MSIL Linker had a better chance…

Based on how Xamarin performed prior to the MS acquisition, I'd guess dead.

The license cost was high, and the MS acquisition came right around the time React Native and Flutter started to enter v1. I think they'd of been blown out of the water pretty quickly. At least Microsoft allowed Xamarin to get into enterprise .NET shops pretty quickly. There's a lot of B2B form based apps written in Xamarin. I worked on a pretty big one that made (and continues to make) a lot of money.

I've long assumed the point of the acquisition was because Xamarin did basically all the hard work of allowing .NET to be cross platform.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#172

I always assumed Microsoft did not condone Wine or other re-implementations of their APIs (like ReactOS), but that they were protected by DMCA reverse engineering provisions and anyway too insignificant to send the legal team after. Wikipedia says, > Until 2020, Microsoft had not made any public statements about Wine. ... On 16 February 2005, Ivan Leo Puoti discovered that Microsoft had started checking the Windows R…

Microsoft in 2024 feels like a different beast. All the MS devs I know seem fully on board with totally cross-platform support. Half of them are coding on MacBooks and I would hazard a guess that a good proportion of .NET web sites being built are being deployed onto Linux boxen.

.Net SRE here, all our .Net REST APIs are deployed on Kubernetes. Devs are still mostly on Windows because Visual Studio.

I've worked with Azure team, all greenfield they do for Azure goes on Linux as well. Windows Server is pretty much dead to Microsoft though it will be continue to be supported and released because $$$.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, nobody wants to write Winforms new applications today My point is about running existing applications on Linux, there are still issues with running .Net GUI stuff under wine and Mono was not a perfect implementation. I read in other comments that the newer .Net cross platform stuff is not a replacement for Mono for running this old applications. (nobody will rewrite them to use the current GUI stuff from MS sin…

No, Microsoft's .NET only supports WinForms on Windows. They do have an official cross platform GUI toolkit in MAUI, but it strangely does not support Linux.

>but it strangely does not support Linux.

Support reasons. Still isn't the year of Linux Desktop.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#174
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Microsoft has finally realized that its animus toward projects like Wine and pre-acquisition Mono was ultimately unproductive, and a net negative for Microsoft itself. I still don't trust MS's motives in general, but I think they at least recognize that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a g…

I think it's just such a clear business-razor because of the cloud: can I take my app and spin up a bajillion cheapo servers with no licensing costs using that stack? If the answer for .Net was 'no' then there are meaningful domains where people would just jump ship in a second. Research, academia, teaching, and certain government areas pop to mind. Keeping Linux support, because of that server dominance, is a core c…

Presumably being able to make money spinning up cheapo servers, via Azure, just reinforces that decision.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#175
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m surprised that such an old product would even get bug fixes. It’s not like Microsoft is fixing bugs in .NET Framework anymore.

.NET Framework isn't EOL and is probably going to be supported forever pretty much. There are still regular updates to .NET Framework distributed through Windows Update.

"Supported"... Kind of. Showstopper stuff is fixed. Other stuff is not. My last company had two open bugs with .Net Framework on more recent versions of Windows Server that were year and half old.

.Net Framework will be supported as long as Windows Servers OSes it runs on support it. If Windows Server team ever casts it out, it will die.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#176
I'm genuinely curious, for someone who develops web application backends and larger distributed systems & infrastructure, predominantly using Go and Python, exclusively targeting Linux, is there anything in the .NET ecosystem that anyone would recommend I take a look at? Many thanks.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#177
post #113
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a dog person: a puppy would be a burden (financially and time-wise) and provide me barely any fun.

To be fair, "free as in beer" doesn't work for a lot of people who don't drink (or do drink, but don't like beer). I don't think we're going to come up with a one-size-fits-all slogan...

Free food? Organic vegetable stew?

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#178
post #160
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i want to love dotnet-core, especially since godot switched from mono in godot 3 to dotnet-core in godot 4, but so far i haven't been able to currently debian has a mono package but no dotnet-core package. i'm not sure why this is; usually when debian lacks a popular nominally open-source package like this, it's either because it fails to build from source, or because it has some kind of tricky licensing pitfall that…

You can add add Microsoft's repo to install it on Debian: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-... . Does Debian require packages to work on all of its architectures? If so, that could be the issue. .NET Core only supports x86, x64, and Arm64 (I think Arm32 has been discontinued and RISC-V is experimental at this point). It's possible that they object to .NET Core having certain license restric…

I would say it is .Net Foundation job to prepare and submit the package not Debian maintainers.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#179
post #160
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i want to love dotnet-core, especially since godot switched from mono in godot 3 to dotnet-core in godot 4, but so far i haven't been able to currently debian has a mono package but no dotnet-core package. i'm not sure why this is; usually when debian lacks a popular nominally open-source package like this, it's either because it fails to build from source, or because it has some kind of tricky licensing pitfall that…

You can add add Microsoft's repo to install it on Debian: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-... . Does Debian require packages to work on all of its architectures? If so, that could be the issue. .NET Core only supports x86, x64, and Arm64 (I think Arm32 has been discontinued and RISC-V is experimental at this point). It's possible that they object to .NET Core having certain license restric…

to be clear, my question about debian is not about whether i can install dotnet-core in debian; it's about why it isn't in debian's repositories rather than microsoft's. microsoft, to understate the case somewhat, doesn't provide the stringent protections for users that debian does

debian doesn't require packages to work on all of its architectures. luajit, for example, has not been ported to riscv64, mips64el, or ppc64el https://packages.debian.org/sid/luajit, though lua5.1 is https://packages.debian.org/sid/lua5.1. what the debian policy manual says about architecture-specific packages seems to be https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.ht...:

> Specifying a specific list of architectures indicates that the source will build an architecture-dependent package only on architectures included in the list. Specifying a list of architecture wildcards indicates that the source will build an architecture-dependent package on only those architectures that match any of the specified architecture wildcards. Specifying a list of architectures or architecture wildcards other than any is for the minority of cases where a program is not portable or is not useful on some architectures. Where possible, the program should be made portable instead.

i don't think the license you link to would be a problem in itself, because it only applies to certain files which are not useful for running dotnet-core on debian anyway. debian has lots of packages from which non-free-software files have been removed. i don't know anything about diasymreader?

with respect to esp32 and ch32v003, what i meant to point to was not the risc-v architecture (some esp32s are tensilica!) but the limited memory space; jit compilation is not a good fit for 2 kibibytes of ram or even 520 kilobytes of ram

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#180
post #178
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can add add Microsoft's repo to install it on Debian: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-... . Does Debian require packages to work on all of its architectures? If so, that could be the issue. .NET Core only supports x86, x64, and Arm64 (I think Arm32 has been discontinued and RISC-V is experimental at this point). It's possible that they object to .NET Core having certain license restric…

I would say it is .Net Foundation job to prepare and submit the package not Debian maintainers.

if you want your package to be in debian, you are going to have to find a debian developer who is willing to take responsibility for maintaining it. microsoft is already providing .deb packages on their website, at least binaries
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