Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft

Announcement page here.

I think it is relevant to Unity in general.

 

Unity seems firmly down the IL2CPP route but I wish this would have happened ages ago when first rumored. Especially since Microsoft seemed to be a pretty decent partner with Unity, I'm sure they would offer better terms on a mono upgrade.

 

Here's hoping this is a long term positive for Unity and a resolution to the licensing issue. Please dear lord let this be the death of the antiquated gc. But yeah, maybe it's too late given IL2CPP.

 

Possible outcomes:

• Visual Studio Community Edition with full support for iOS and Android without Xamarin
• Xamarin Studio Community Edition will full support for iOS and Android
• Mono runtime moves to liberal, non L/GPL license (i.e. BSD, MIT)
• Visual Studio Mac version

 

So it finally happened. Next up, Unity?

 

That's my prediction.

 

My guess is that Xamarin will become free with Visual Studio. Microsoft already put a lot of eggs in that basket with all of the new mobile development and debugging features that you can optionally install with Visual Studio 2015 (including Community Editing since it is just Pro with difference licensing).

 

I feel like we're slowly progressing towards a cross-platform development suite. They have already started down this route by developing Visual Studio Code (my assumption being that it's intended to replace VS's internal editor) and now they've acquired a cross-platform compiler for .NET.

About the only thing left for them now is to acquire a cross-platform game engine.

 

Beef-up Monogame?

 

Monogame is nowhere near the same. Microsoft abandoned XNA for a reason after all.

 

Monogame is a cross platform game engine. I thought with all the software engineers at Xamarin that are familiar with Monogame, and are now Microsofties, perhaps someone might say, "Hey lets branch Monogame and add this this and this. And make our whole eco-system that much sweeter." Just Hypetheticalizing.

 

I'll still hoping that Microsoft ports Silverlight to WebAssembly.

That would make me very happy.

Maybe they'll buy Unity just for the IL2CPP tech! Got my fingers crossed.

 

That makes as little sense as following sentence: I'll still hoping that Adobe ports Flash to WebAssembly. Face it, Silverlight is dead, even deader than Flash is.

Also, it's very bad news for the open source community as a whole, especially people using Mono on Linux as M$ will either stop updating it (as they did with Skype once acquired - Linux version is nowhere near the functionality of Windows one) or straight up remove it from repos, close it down and sue anybody who tries to fork it and develop it further. They'll lose, obviously, because LGPL and such, but they'll try.

 

Only for those who used Mono. Those who didn't will get to rub it in.

 

I don't agree with this. Microsoft has moved towards a very open source centric mindset. Just about everything they are releasing for devs is open source now. Want the .net source code? Download it, MVC source code? Yep. New C# roslyn compiler? Sure why not.

They've got a ways to go still, but they're changing their corporate identity and embracing open source.

They are also all about making it easy for devs to get into their technology. They have free versions of just about everything because they know that getting devs into their tech gets businesses into their tech and that's where they make their money.

https://github.com/Microsoft

23 pages of open source projects.

 

Same here, but that it doesn't happen. I can't see that the end result would be good for anyone. We don't need more companies being gobbled up by big corporations, we need less of that. And yeah, Silverlight is pretty dead.

--Eric

 

Yeah, it's nice that Unity's agenda is literally "make games work on everything".

If it got purchased by a platform holder I'm sure that would tend towards "make games work on everything... but mostly our stuff".

 

It's possible there would be good intentions...at the beginning. It's naive to think those would stick for long though, reality being what it is.

--Eric

 

I'll believe this when I can download full sources of Windows (kernel+userland) and/or sources of Microsoft Office released under LGPL.

 

Well there's such a thing as solving today's problems, today. IL2CPP is needed for WebGL, needed for performance and also allows Unity to perform specific optimisations relevant to Unity. So IL2CPP is a very good as a technology in general.

 

Nah. .Net Native already works and isn't riddled with the bugs that IL2CPP is.

 

I think this is great news about Xamarin. Hopefully Microsoft won't mess things up here. I never want to see MS gobble up Unity.

 

There is a big difference between opening up your development suites and opening up the source of your income.

 

Do you plan to release all of your games under LGPL or MIT licensing with full source?

 

They have several abandoned operating systems, though. Win 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, Win XP, Win2000, MS-DOS (well, not really an operating system). Haven't heard about them releasing their source code.

Contributing back to opensource projects you're using is still an option. Making an engine and releasing it under mit/zlib/bsd license is also an option, as long as you keep actual art assets and game-specific scripts under control.

 

http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/201...dos-and-word-for-windows-available-to-public/

They're getting there.

 

Well...

-----

....VERY slowly.

 

At first I was excited... then I noticed it's only for DOS 1.1 and 2.0.

 

While they might change the mono license, I think the long term plan is to kill it off. The larger MS strategy of killing competition by acquiring it has not really changed. Open source was a necessity for MS. Supporting both mono and Coreclr long term just makes no sense really IMO. So I don't know what their tactics will be for killing it off, but I'm betting that is the end game.

 

It cannot be killed off. At most they can stop issuing licenses to deploy mono compiled applications to mobile which would mean no more mono for mobile.

Mono is more than just mobile though and cannot be "killed off" in that way as it's an open source project. If the key maintainers stop contributing people will pick up the slack and maintain its current state. I do not see a reason for Microsoft to abandon Mono however I do see them replacing it with Core which will basically meet many people's needs anyway. From what I've read it looks like it's going to be superior in a lot of ways for mobile too.

 

If M$ finally gets hands on Unity and get rid of the ex EA guy, I believe Unity would become a much better company;
Maybe as good as from the 2.6 days.

 

Mono was not competition. Microsoft was crucial in helping mono get started and enable the CLR on non Windows platforms. Microsoft has also been open sourcing .net, entity framework, compilers, etc and have said their goal is to have uniform support cross platform. Buying xamarin is aove in that direction as they increase support for *nix and soon osx platforms. They've also already built mobile debugging capabilities for Android into visual studio.

These are the things they've demonstrated thus far. It's unwise to speculate otherwise this early in the game.

 

Eventually, yes.

 

No, no, no. Microsoft's is waaay worse than EA. They just wear "nice guy" mask, while EA doesn't care about such subtleties.

 

If MS got hand on unity, I'd expect them to kill off support for non-microsoft platforms, OR tie half of the functionality into microsoft products or services. I think it'll be the best if Unity stays more or less independent.

 

* none of the above

 

Yes. Just like they only released Visual Studio Code for Windows... oh wait.

 

Not funny. The company is known for Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy and spreading disinformation.
The thing is - it is the old microsoft (Gates/Ballmer) that is known for doing that. I'm not sure what to expect from new one. Either way, it is safe to assume that company of this size is not a friend. They'll have their own interests in mind first, so you'll want to quadruple-check that their interests match yours.

 

Likewise it isn't funny to constantly have to wade through this non-stop hatred some people feel like repeating.

Exactly.

I don't think anyone considers them a friend, but we don't need to automatically treat them as an enemy.

 

This. The spread of dotnet and others (java) should be on its way out as the smaller less resource hungry hardware has proliferated. This was java's masterplan when it was first conceived, java will be everywhere, today everything has gone back to native. Sidestep the pains of c++ and the joy of python to get google go. Why are we still tied to mono/c#?

 

What hatred? No hatred here.
The talk about hatred is silly. Do you, for example, hate fire? Or maybe love it? Or are you indifferent it? Either way if you stick your hand into fireplace, it is gonna hurt, regardless of your feelings about the subject.

It is a matter of fact, that if you get acquired or managed by large corp, they may modify or annihilate features you originally deemed important or your entire product, because their goal will be maximizing their own revenue stream.

Basically, when in doubt, assume that bigger company is managed by Lucifer. Then check your agreements really carefully and try to guess what they'll be getting from it. It is one thing when, say, someone makes a company and then wants to sell it, and the other thing is when they want to preserve their product, practices or ideas.

I honestly think unity will be better off as independent company.

 

Talk of 'hatred' is really just a reflection of the reputation Microsoft built for themselves over a number of decades. Many negative perceptions are now one of their biggest problems, and its clear they know it and have been struggling to change these perceptions for some years now.

I'm pretty sure they'll be a aware as anybody else of how this could poison things if they decided to acquire Unity. Never say never, but I don't think they will try at the moment. I'm certainly going to watch the Xamarin thing with interest to see how they do with that, what mistakes are made or avoided, and any implications for Unity in future.

 

A rose by any other name and all that.

Yes, I agree Unity is currently much better on its own. Xamarin is another matter though.

 

*rolls eyes*.
Some people seriously overestimate their ability to read minds on the internet.

 

How else would you term "dislike to the point they have to repeatedly remind everyone around them"?

 

So Xamarin is now free with Visual Studio Community (which I believe can be used by small teams up to 5 people.) And Mono is MIT!

I have been liking the new Microsoft that wants to open source .NET and get it everywhere, even promoting tools to develop .NET apps for iOS/Android. They even ported SQL Server to Linux, and soon you will be able to run real Ubuntu binaries (bash, ssh, etc.) on Windows 10 without an emulation layer or some cygwin concoction. Hell has apparently frozen over -- who says climate change can't be good?

As for motives, I think they, like a lot of companies, realize there is a lot of money to be made in providing IaaS/PaaS/SaaS (Azure is the new mantra,) and putting price tags on their entry points is a barrier to them gaining long-term revenue. Anyway...

What does this mean for Unity3D getting an updated mono sooner?

Every year or so I try to dig through this forum to try to gain glimpses of where UT is at with getting me a modern version of mono, because I got burned in trying to port a .NET game to Unity3D a while ago. It would be nice if this was on a status page somewhere.

[UPDATE] I found the thread with relevant disucssion on this topic -- go there: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/xamarin-now-free-and-supposedly-open-source.395040/