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Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin

By | May 16, 2011, 1:56pm PDT

Summary: Just over a week after reports that Attachmate/Novell was axing the team that developed the Mono open-source implementation of .Net, Miguel de Icaza announced plans to keep the technology alive via a new startup, Xamarin.

Just over a week after reports that Attachmate/Novell was axing the team that developed the Mono open-source implementation of .Net, Miguel de Icaza announced plans to keep the technology alive via a new startup, Xamarin.

De Icaza blogged on May 16 about the creation of Xamarin and its charter. De Icaza, the founder of the Mono project, said his new company will be building a new commercial .NET offering for iOS; building a new commercial .NET offering for Android; and contributing, maintaining and developing the open source Mono and Moonlight components. Xamarin also will be exploring “the Moonlight opportunities in the mobile space and the Mac appstore,” de Icaza said. (Moonlight is an open-source implementation of Silverlight.)

“Development started early this morning,” de Icaza posted on May 16. “We will first deliver the iPhone stack, followed by the Android stack, and then the Moonlight ports to both platforms.”

“The new versions of .NET for the iPhone and Android will be source compatible with MonoTouch and Mono for Android,” he said. “Like those versions, they will be commercial products, built on top of the open core Mono.” (De Icaza and his team built the MonoTouch products while working for Novell.)

“They (Novell) own the proprietary stacks, the stuff we have to rebuild; The rest is community-owned under open source licenses,” de Icaza explained to me on Monday.

De Icaza noted that he and his team had been attempting to spin Mono off from Novell for more than a year, but the plan was never executed. On May 2, Attachmate/Novell laid off the Canadian and American Mono teams, with the European, Brazilian and Japanese teams getting the axe a few days later. De Icaza said his last day at Novell was Friday, May 13. He said that the new Xamarin team has angel funding, as well as “a couple of engineering contracts that will help us stay together as a team while we ship our revenue generating products.”

Microsoft’s relationship with the Mono team has been up and down over the years. Microsoft officials have pointed to Mono as evidence that its Silverlight and .Net platforms had legs beyond Windows.

I asked Microsoft whether it was providing any financial backing or any other support to the Xamarin team and have yet to hear back.

Attachmate bought Novell in April, and more than 800 of Novell’s patents were purchased by CPTN Holdings, an entity comprised of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and EMC.

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Topics

Mono, Team, Novell Inc., .Net, Development Tools, Team Management, Open Source, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Management, Mary Jo Foley

Mary Jo has covered the tech industry for more than 25 years for a variety of publications and Web sites, and is a frequent guest on radio, TV and podcasts, speaking about all things Microsoft-related. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

Disclosure

Mary-Jo Foley

Freelance journalist/blogger Mary Jo Foley has nothing to disclose. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). I do not own Microsoft stock or stock in any of its partners or competitors. I have no business ventures that are sponsored by/funded by Microsoft or any of its partners or competitors.

Biography

Mary-Jo Foley

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 25 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She has kept close tabs on Microsoft strategy, products and technologies for the past 10 years. In the late 1990s, she penned the award-winning "At The Evil Empire" column for ZDNet, and more recently the Microsoft Watch blog for Ziff Davis.

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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
dfwekrwe1801-24353658626831248053446550489043 Updated - 10th Nov
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0 Votes
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while mono is less evil than .net
Linux Geek 16th May 2011
de Icaza will be better off working for google against M$ and Apple.
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
xvision 16th May 2011
@Linux Geek
+1
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
jhughesy 17th May 2011
@Linux Geek Why?
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
Linux Geek 17th May 2011
@jhughesy
because open source luminaries said so.
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
terjeb@... 18th May 2011
@jhughesy Becayse Jezuz said so, and if you don't know that then you are one of the evil-doers that hate jezuz, little kittens and everything else Linux Geek thinks is holier than holy.

Or, in other words, there are more morons out there than sane people. Anyone with a name like Linux Geek is significantly more likely to be in the majority.
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
bmonsterman 23rd May 2011
@Linux Geek,

"because open source luminaries said so."

BAAAAAAAHHHH. Sheep. Can't you formulate your own opinion?
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
bmonsterman 23rd May 2011
@Linux Geek,
"Less Evil"? Explain what is evil about mono.
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
Raid6 25th May 2011
@Linux Geek

"...working for google against..."

You have problems. Businesses are in business for profit and to benefit the shareholders best interest.

That is what drives economies.

Free economies depend on competition. There is a balance of serving the needs and whims of boards, shareholders and laws and ensuring that they deliver the best value to the customers.

If company "A" cannot do it but company "B" can, guess who is going to leap ahead in market share?

In the end it is the consumer that chooses.

For many years now we have had many choices. For a while we really had choices with PCs, Amiga, Atari and Mac all competing for your computer purchase choice.

Through the bad choices of some of the companies, market driven factors, the choices are narrowed.

Several companies have tried to push (market) Linux alternatives to the home users. WalMart and others had Linux based computers but the consumers didn't want them.

When will your ilk understand that for Linux to survive it must compete, not complain!

Linux will NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be a consumer's choice becuase after all, what is Linux anyway?
0 Votes
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mono est nomo
Dietrich T. Schmitz, ~-~ Your Linux Advocate 16th May 2011
nt
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
tonymcs@... 16th May 2011
@Dietrich T. Schmitz

Yep, we don't want no stinking modern software for our phone OSs, it might make them useful wink
0 Votes
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Yes
Tim Patterson 17th May 2011
@Dietrich T. Schmitz, ~-~ Your Linux Advocate

The MS .NET patent trap Mono is almost dead. It's a good thing. It's time for Miguel to drop the pretences and go to work for MS.
0 Votes
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No matter how you look at it
wackoae 16th May 2011
Mono is a patent minefield waiting to explode. That is the reason why no serious company is supporting the platform and pretty much every professional Linux distro are staying the hell away from it (except for Suse ... until the cross licensing contract Novel had with MS expired).
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
LeoD 16th May 2011
*Software* is a patent minefied that's exploding all the time.

If only anyone in power cared & understood enough to fix it.
0 Votes
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Ubuntu and mono?
honeymonster 17th May 2011
@wackoae

"That is the reason why no serious company is supporting the platform and pretty much every professional Linux distro are staying the hell away from it"

How about Ubuntu?
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
debackerl Updated - 17th May 2011
@wackoae

A few years ago, everybody said Mono was risky because Microsoft could sue using some patents, and how cool Java was. Now, Google is being sued by Oracle over Java, and Microsoft was providing test suites to Mono to help make their implementation more compliant.

Oh, and how avoid Google loosing a lawsuit about some patent covering the Linux kernel? Do you want us to stop using the Linux kernel?

Let's face it, with all patent trolls, the whole IT industry is a patent minefield.
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
bmonsterman Updated - 23rd May 2011
@wackoae,

I don't think so. Microsoft published .NET as an ECMA standard. Steer clear of non-ECMA components, ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms (which is older tech anyway), and you'll be fine. Ubuntu includes mono in the default install.
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
GreyGeek77 24th May 2011
@bmonsterman
"Steer clear of ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms and you'll be fine"

Except that all you'll have left is C# and the CLI. You'll still need the GTK# API to create GUIs. So, with LEGAL Mono and 50 cents you can buy a cup of coffee. GTK+ alone is sufficient to build Linux applications and for an API that allows EASY cross platform migration of applications the best tool on the market is the Qt4 SDK.

The ECMA 334 & 335, along with the "Community Promise" gave NO protection to anyone who used the versions of Mono which were distributed with ADO, ASP and WinForms included, even though de Icaza claimed on two different occasions that he and his team were "separating out" the IP parts. Mono is dead. Long may it remain so.
0 Votes
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Another open source fails again
Tim Acheson 17th May 2011
Fail! A timely reminder that the open source philosophy does not work well for big projects. This reminds me of the recent OpenOffice shambles.

Mono is excellent. I'm a real fan of MonoTouch and Moonlight. But most .NET developers recognise that the mainstream commercial version represents value for money.

I love .NET, Visual Studio, etc, and I want and need it to be properly funded -- commercially.
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
willyampz 17th May 2011
@Tim Acheson
Umm...Linux big enough for you? Open source projects often don't work well when run by commercial entities, such as OpenOffice under Sun/Oracle. Now as LibreOffice, the project is independent and moving forward rapidly. The shackles of Sun/Oracle have been removed. But as we've seen, the beauty of open source is it can be forked, although often the name has to be changed due to trademark issues.
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
bmonsterman Updated - 23rd May 2011
@willyampz,

There are alot of deep pockets that have a vested interest in funding Linux development. That doesn't automatically apply to every open source endeavor. Also, I think there needs to be a distinction made between open source projects and free software. If software development isn't funded, by sales or by financially interested parties...it's not going anywhere. Programmers have bills to pay.
0 Votes
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RE: Mono lives ... in new startup Xamarin
gatuus 17th May 2011
I'm wondering if...
If moonlight could live more than 2 years....
HTML5 is coming pretty fast and lots of better tools are being created for javascript/android & ios platforms.
0 Votes
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Will mono live...?
itsols 17th May 2011
If Novell couldn't take it higher with all their strength, I don't know how a start up could...

The whole IT industry is like a giant fishing net with the various fishermen (companies) pulling it in various directions. And the result is not going to be positive.

Look at these:
1. MS buys Skype - guess what will happen to the Linux/Ubuntu users (me included).

2. Google buys the guy who created Python (you get the message)

3. Commercial Oracle buys MySQL (oh, I mean Sun?)

4. Oracle again buys Java (LOL)

5. Now mono is gone!

Hmmm.... Now replace 'buy' above with any term that suggests claiming ownership.
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