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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

#441

Post by bunderbunder »

BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #352
kelnos wrote: 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 disagree. MS was completely succesfull in their goals. They kept a ton of developers busy learing useless Xamarin, thus keeping them from developing products that can actually compete with Microsoft products. Next they killed of an open source competitor (Mono) of their product, stole the usefull bits to put it in .Net, and now they dump the leftover project (that's not competing with them anymore) back into the OS…

I don't think Microsoft viewed Mono as a competitor. Even before Microsoft acquired Xamarin for hundreds of millions of dollars, they already had a history of collaboration on .NET, including sharing test cases in order to help with compatibility, and co-developing integrations into Microsoft products such as Azure and Office 365.

The "keeping [developers] from developing products that can actually compete" assertion is frankly absurd. .NET's real competitor is and has always been Java. Java, possibly the world's most-used platform that isn't JavaScript, has always had heaps more people working on it than .NET's entire ecosystem, let alone just the Mono project.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#443

Post by bmitc »

gymbeaux wrote: post #420
bmitc wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For modern .NET, you don't need to know anything about the legacy terms of Mono, .NET Core, .NET Framework, .NET Standard, etc. All you need is .NET 8 SDK. It's fully-cross platform and installs support for both C# and F#. For example, just download .NET 8 SDK on whatever platform, which is usually very easy on most platforms, and then run `dotnet fsi` to get into an F# REPL.

Oh my god I forgot about .NET Standard. What were they thinking…

While I don't have much direct experience with it, as it was easy to migrate my personal projects, it seemed the idea was sound. It seemed like it was a way to encourage people to write libraries against the new .NET Core (at the time) but still allow those libraries to be used in .NET Framework as a sort of bridge for people stuck on .NET Framework.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#444

Post by adriamaker »

zbowling wrote: post #31

I worked on Mono a lot back in the early 2000s (back in the SVN days before it moved to Git, even). This move makes a lot of sense. Things evolved a lot over the years. Mono's legacy goals, which are to be a portable CLR (.NET) runtime for platforms that Microsoft didn't care about, don't make much sense today. Mono made a lot of sense for running places where full .NET didn't, like in full AOT environments like on t…

Interesting. Perfect fit for Wine!

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#445

Post by hexxington »

sva_ wrote: post #166
Buttons840 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is .NET open-source? Will I find it in an open-source repository?

Seems so https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet

This is the "virtual monorepo", if you want to clone one repo and build the entire SDK product then this is the correct thing to checkout - but development work right now still happens in the separate project repos, of which there are ~20

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#446

Post by djmips »

stcroixx wrote: post #433

Another perfect execution of embrace(Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin), extend(Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork), extinguish(we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET) for anyone who thought MS had actually changed since th…

Only wrinkle is that Mono was originally a .NET runtime for Linux. So they weren't embracing an external standard but a knock-off of their own. But I still agree with elements of your statement in principle. However, giving Mono back to open source is an interesting development and I don't know how it fits in your narrative.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#447

Post by ineedaj0b »

hexxington wrote: post #294
ineedaj0b wrote: post #253

i think this is related to Xbox soon launching a handheld gaming device like the switch/steam deck. anything that directly refutes this hunch?

Me. I directly refute this hunch. Nothing to do with xbox ever entered the discussion.

thanks!

I kept thinking Microsoft needs to port a windows version for their handheld, doesn't want to use steamos, but also needs to work with 'interesting' hardware. Their answer would be a linux port imo, but having too much there could annoy trust regulators so they divested from mono. but I had zero proof for any of these hunches.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#448

Post by fluoridation »

nedt wrote: post #157

Mono was very useful in university. Must have been 2005 when I got asked if I wanted to use Java or C# for the programming course. Being bored with Java I picked C#. We were a very small group of two students. But as I just had a Powerbook I used Mono to run it on OS X. At the end of the course someone from Microsoft came to the university to answer any of our question about upcoming features in .NET and C#. And as w…

8! is 40320. Even if it took 10 times as many iterations to find the correct order, it would still only be less than 4 million swaps. Just how slow was that computer?

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#449

Post by internetter »

hinkley wrote: post #291
rgovostes wrote: post #94

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…

AWS Supports one of the tools for porting out of AWS. Supporting something that looks like an escape valve (whether it works or not) keeps the antitrust people off your neck.

What tool is that?

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#450

Post by fluoridation »

stcroixx wrote: post #433

Another perfect execution of embrace(Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin), extend(Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork), extinguish(we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET) for anyone who thought MS had actually changed since th…

That's not what EEE is. For starters, the term applies to standards, not to implementations. The standard here is .NET, which Microsoft controlled from the start.
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