Microsoft Donates the Mono Project To Wine (gamingonlinux.com) 67
Microsoft has decided to donate the Mono Project to the developers of Wine, FOSS that allows Windows applications to run on Unix-like operating systems. "Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications," notes GameOnLinux's Liam Dawe. "It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime."
"Wine already makes use of Mono and this move makes sense with Microsoft focusing on open-source .NET and other efforts," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "Formally handing over control of the upstream Mono project to WineHQ is a nice move by Microsoft rather than just letting the upstream Mono die off or otherwise forked." Microsoft's Jeff Schwartz announced the move on the Mono website and in a GitHub post: The Mono Project (mono/mono) ('original mono') has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016. The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024. We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono - GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.
Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork. We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us.
Thank you to all the Mono developers!
"Wine already makes use of Mono and this move makes sense with Microsoft focusing on open-source .NET and other efforts," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "Formally handing over control of the upstream Mono project to WineHQ is a nice move by Microsoft rather than just letting the upstream Mono die off or otherwise forked." Microsoft's Jeff Schwartz announced the move on the Mono website and in a GitHub post: The Mono Project (mono/mono) ('original mono') has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016. The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024. We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono - GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.
Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork. We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us.
Thank you to all the Mono developers!
Probably not the first time.. (Score:3, Funny)
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There are people who will kiss (or more) for a whole lot less than a billion.
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"Thanks" (Score:1, Troll)
So Microsoft gets a substantial tax writeoff for a charitable donaiton, and WineHQ gets... additional maintenance obligations.
How very Microsoft of them.
Re:"Thanks" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Uhm....yeah....if they don't want it, they aren't obligated to accept this donation. Now with that, I believe they have already ownership of a fork for their needs.
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they don't have much choice here, wine depends on mono. that's what you get yourself into when you decide to make stuff written for windows run on linux. so if ms isn't interested anymore, and not much anybody else gives a fig, they will have to maintain it themselves.
ms has actually been paying for the whole thing all along from the beginning, in some form or another, because it validated the notion that their net thing was platform agnostic and "open" in nature, which was ofc pure hogwash they don't reall
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It's "open source", but Microsoft basically promised to sue for patent infringement if you exercised the right to change the code.
But now their patent infringement case gets blown up when a mono modification originates from a Wine github tree. Its still a "win" for open source. The nature of all commercial pursuits is to sue when its patents are infringed, that's the only way it can protect its revenue stream. Microsoft only cares about a corporate entity taking the mono code standard and making a commercial profit from it without compensating Microsoft.
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So Microsoft gets a substantial tax writeoff for a charitable donaiton, and WineHQ gets... additional maintenance obligations.
How very Microsoft of them.
Maybe true, but doubtful anybody thought it through that far. It was likely this conversation, maybe using slightly different wording:
"We gotta dump this trash."
"Give it to the chodes at WINE? They'll gobble up anything and treat it like gold."
"Awesome. We lose a piece of shit and gain bonus points in the field? Well done. Next?"
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Mono is not trash. Its a way to export Microsoft frameworks to environments outside of the Microsoft platform. If WINE didn't utilize mono, they wouldn't have accepted Microsoft's offering. If you really want to prevent mono from being used outside of Microsoft platforms, you should be attacking the software developers that choose to use mono (and then be a dick like Microsoft).
Not substantial (Score:3)
So Microsoft gets a substantial tax writeoff for a charitable donaiton
Only if they're donating something of substantial value.
The MS press release about their acquisition of Xamarin in 2016 didn't mention a purchase price, which is a pretty good indication of how immaterial the acquisition cost was. So unless the value of Xamarin increased post-acquisition, there's not much market value there.
"Charity" (Score:2)
I donated a pair of old sneakers to charity last night. I kept asking myself if anyone would really want them.
Probably how Microsoft felt.
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Re:Burn it (Score:4, Insightful)
Your rant is so 2005.
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""Virtual Machine" programming has proven to provide the opposite of what it was suppose to."
The fact that you refer to this technology as "virtual machine" programming shows what an ignorant fool you are.
"It's LESS secure and LESS portable than the old ways."
This reflects both an ignorance of the intentions of the technology and a lack of understanding of it. What a surprise.
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The fact that you refer to this technology as "virtual machine" programming shows what an ignorant fool you are.
What are the "cool" kids calling it now?
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The fact that you refer to this technology as "virtual machine" programming shows what an ignorant fool you are.
I mean, that is an accurate description, even if OP's comment is stupid.
Re: Burn it (Score:5, Interesting)
Mono is built into every Unity game, not to mention almost every game since the 90s has either a VM or script engine built in, Quake (1) had a VM.
VMs won, they're more secure than the native code they replaced, and portability doesn't mean "between flavors of glibc based Linux", it means between Linux, Windows, Mac, and other Unix systems that have very, very different runtime environments beyond the standard C library stuff.
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Unity has been working on moving from Mono to CoreCLR (the runtime for .NET Core and .NET 5+) for years now. Performance is one of the big reasons, CoreCLR's massively faster than Mono. Or the original closed-source .NET runtime, for that matter.
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When I tried to use Unity I was impressed by how awkward and limited it was. Mono/NET helped with that?
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Mono was created by Miguel de Icaza in the year 2001, to head off the potential threat of entry level software developers adopting exclusively controlled Microsoft frameworks. At the time, Microsoft was embracing and extending its managed language environment with no fee IDEs. In hindsight, that concern turned out to be unfounded. (That didn't stop the A-bomb developers at the time from speculating their invention could ignite Earth's atmosphere and destroy the world.)
Fast forward to 2016, Microsoft, lon
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Java found its niche in data center servers, for the most part running on Linux, while .net has got roughly zero traction outside Microsoft. Add mono to that share and the result is still roughly zero.
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Java found its niche in data center servers, for the most part running on Linux, while .net has got roughly zero traction outside Microsoft.
And what is Java's "traction" outside of those data center servers, say a desktop PC?
Add mono to that share and the result is still roughly zero.
And how does that invalidate:
Even now, developers that want their products to be cross-platform on managed languages are better off having mono than using java.
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Approximately nobody cares about making their products cross platform on managed platforms.
So Mono (Score:2)
You'll be able to hear a w(h)ine in only one channel
its in dolby stereo but I never hear it right
I don't care its all chocolate barrel wrap to me
Free (Score:3)
Free disobedient dog with fleas.
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I'm curious why you're complaining about an ancient tech stack that has largely been replaced by MVC, Blazor or any innumerable other "modern" UX technologies. For years Microsoft has been trying to get people off of ASP.NET web forms, which is a descendant of the very old Windows Forms technology.
If you're looking to "lift and shift" ASP.NET 2.0 in the IIS6 environment I'd say you got bigger issues and likely a lot of tech debt borne of a bad architecture and worse maintenance.
Re: So Microsoft donates handicapped .NET (Score:1)
An ancient tech stack that everybody uses simply because it was promoted by Microsoft to be the end all solution.
Sure I can replace the entire thing with PHP or Node or Python at the point I would be able to consider switching to Mono but the world doesnâ(TM)t work that way. I have a closed source module in IIS, I can keep using IIS and it will work for the foreseeable future but it wonâ(TM)t be open source in any way shape or form.
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Didn't know WinForms was legacy: https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com] (that is from 2023).
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I understand Microsoft wants to get rid of their legacy, but what are they offering to replace it? They've been pushing .NET Framework for over 2 decades, they can't just drop it overnight and say, hey, we're just going to let all that stuff go. From what I understand all the legacy stuff is still accessible in .NET 8. Are they planning on a clean overhaul like Python3 did?
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I think your news is about a decade out of date... the .NET Framework, what has been included with Windows for years and years is generally closed source (ie while you can read the code, you can't fork it and make your own), and hasn't seen much in the way of expansions over the years, while the 'dot net core' versions, and later the unified .NET 5, followed by 6, 7, 8 & the currently in development 9 have been open source and un
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As I replied above, that is not the complete thing, even a cursory look at the repos would reveal that.
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Weird how you cannot reply with the specifics of what you talk about... either your earlier post, or what sections of .NET you claim are missing, thus making the whole thing closed source (your term).
Re: So Microsoft donates handicapped .NET (Score:1)
Read the fucking comments in the README of the repo: ASP.NET Core, not ASP.NET; WinForms repo is a fork of a specific version of the framework extracted from 4.8, since then breaking changes have been introduced; Source from the Microsoft .NET Reference Source that represent a subset of the .NET Framework
If all of .NET Framework is now open source, where is .NET4 or 2 in this? This is another project similar to Mono, it is .NET Core, like you get Windows Core, a dressed down version that is not really ever
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F**k, too bad I already posted here. This comment does not deserve "-1" mod score.
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No, the point being made was the entirety of .NET is now open source. Which it isn't. You fanboys claiming it is because Microsoft put some read-only partial source code isn't going to change the reality.
Whether or not YOU call it old school, modern/new projects still use WinForms, it is still being advertised as the go-to for GUI.
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So it can focus on maintaining the disaster that is the closed source .NET.
That closed source "disaster" makes 70 billion dollars per year (OS+office+services); about 35% of its yearly revenue . (And I'm not counting in its Azure cloud or Windows server software & packages.) Frankly, I'd rather code on mono than java.
Smells to me like either Microsoft wants to dump .NET and come up with their next VisualBasic or they want to take .NET in a completely different direction
Smells to me like you're a clueless fool. The money saved by dumping mono is still couch cushion change for Microsoft. They literally do not want to distract corporate managers and developers attention away from AI, search, and more lucrative pursuits.
Either way Mono is dead as a project in the long run.
So is CO
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Frankly, I'd rather code on mono than java.
I question the sanity, or at least the masochism, of anyone who doesn't.
C# is infinitely less fucking obnoxious than Java at the language level, and the CLR VMs seem to behave infinitely better than the JVM.
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To be fair, both Java and DOTNET are excellent for writing bloated unreliable junk.
wait wut? (Score:2)
"Formally handing over control of the upstream Mono project to WineHQ is a nice move by Microsoft rather than just letting the upstream Mono die off or otherwise forked."
Isn't "handing over control" literally a combination of "forking", then letting the upstream "die off"? Isn't the difference only in who owns the name?
Don't see how this is any "nice move", it's just bailing out, though in a non-litigious way.
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I didn't read the article itself, but if you donate (give away) something, you actually hand over the copyright.
That means WineHQ could do things like release closed-source version or make it public domain etc. They also presumably get the trademarks; the name, the logos etc. If someone wants to buy a specially licensed version Mono to integrate into say their game engine software suite without it being open source, WineHQ could now sell them such a version, because they now properly own Mono.
The article do
Iâ(TM)m sure if Microsoft really wanted to he (Score:3)
Iâ(TM)m sure if Microsoft really wanted to help Wine, they could come up with something else.
Access to internal API documentation leaps to mindâ¦
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I don't think that Microsoft wants to pull the fridge away from the cabinets for anyone. Only they know what lives behind it and there could be teaming masses of bugs that scatter when the light hits them...
MonoDevelop? (Score:3)
Wonder if they will start updating Mono Develop Again ? It wasn't a bad tool until M$ made it Visual Studio for the Mac.. now that it's discontinued.
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Plus, assuming there isn't one already, it would just be easier to port mono support to Visual Code.
What's the point? (Score:2)
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Why .NET being open source and fairly complete, what's the point of Mono these days? Shouldn't Wine just dump Mono and adopt .NET too?
The UI-side of things has no official Linux counterpart, no Winforms, no WPF or the new-ish MAUI
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Why .NET being open source and fairly complete, what's the point of Mono these days?
.NET is only a "framework". It is implemented in "unmanaged" languages as well as "managed" languages. You're assuming that .NET "the spec" runs 100% the same on linux as windows. (There's a possibility mono may have a higher compatibility (by implementation) to windows code behavior.) Some casuals don't want to code in a compiled language, and prefer "muscle" memory to reinventing the wheel in a different language.