Future of Mono

Absolutely fantastic news: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Jul-18.html

 

Indeed

I kind of expected it to go this way with them forming Xamarin

 

I am surprised the linux nuts aren't complaining anywhere on that page.

And this is fantastic news.

 

What does it mean for unity though?

 

It means that Xamarin now has the IP for Mono, which means they also have the commercial rights for the runtime. The runtime is released under GPL, with the exception that Novell so far was allowed to sell commercial licenses. Now Xamarin has those rights. It could have become a huge problem for Unity otherwise.

 

Hmmm, can Xamarin not make this bad for Unity?

The way Xamarin can see it, is that Unity is bad for their sales. As people will be purchasing Unity licenses, not Xamarin licenses to develop IPhone/Android apps using C#/Mono

 

They could make it bad for Unity. But being a young company, I highly doubt that is anywhere near a goal for them. I think the deals with Unity and such are more helpful to them than harmful. Of course, only time can tell what will happen.

 

No they can't make it bad for unity.

unity branched out its mono version already in 2009 or alike, they have not been running on the official ones for quite some time.

the only "bad" they could do is prevent unity from using newer mono versions but those are off for another 18months or so anyway as Mono 2.8+ break too much again and you won't see an upgrade to them during the 3.x lifecycle

 

But i don't think this will be as bad. Look at how oracle have ruin java. Hopefully mono will be better.

 

Miguel has been at Unite and loves Unity. He's blogged about it numerous times as well. There is nothing to worry about.

 

Pretty surely, they founded Xamarin because they wanted to keep it alive

 

I hope Mono does well, I really like the language and think a full cross-platform managed language is ideal.

I have to wonder why the hell didnt microsoft just push to make .NET full cross platform themselves in the first place? Wasn't that the point?

Also @zine92, how has java been ruined? I've been wondering as of late what benefits mono offers over java if any.

 

I was under the impressions that the point of .net was just to make an easy to use framework for their platform to attract even more people to there OS instead of others. If Microsoft wanted it to work on other platforms, they would have done so years ago.

 

They did design it with crossplatform in mind, thats why the related stuff is declared open standard. But they don't implement it for other platforms than their own cause only on theirs they can guarantee that the OS isn't stupid and fights it or that all features are present.
On other platforms they would have to invest a lot of money at little gain.

btw they support and target other platforms partially, silverlight for example has an osx installer