Microsoft has announced the transfer of the Mono project, which develops an alternative implementation of the .NET platform, to the WineHQ organization, which develops an open implementation of the Win32 API. Microsoft acquired the Mono project after acquiring Xamarin in 2016. The Mono platform was initially intended to develop tools for mobile application development in C# using .NET technologies, but over time the project stagnated, and significant releases have not been made since 2019, although regular corrective updates continued to be published.
Since Mono was used in Wine to run .NET-based executables compiled for Windows, the Wine developers maintained a synchronized fork of Wine Mono, which was successfully accompanied and updated regularly. Evaluating the situation, Microsoft decided to transfer the main Mono project to the Wine community and make the Wine Mono repository the main one. The code in the old Mono repository will be preserved but switched to archival mode. Previously created ready-made builds will remain available for the next four years.
By transferring the original Mono to Wine, Microsoft will continue to support a more modern fork of Mono Runtime, which is included in the codebase of the open .NET platform. It is planned to gradually migrate Microsoft project components that are still dependent on Mono to this fork. Microsoft also stated that it recommends users of applications that use Mono to transition to the unified .NET platform, which includes Mono Runtime.
The Mono platform was founded in 2001 by Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman, who established the company Ximian to develop their projects. In 2003, Ximian was sold to Novell, and the first release of Mono 1.0, which came out in 2004, was prepared as part of Novell. In 2011, as a result of a restructuring following Novell's acquisition by Attachmate, all developers of the Mono project were laid off. In response, Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman founded a new company, Xamarin, which began developing and supporting Mono-related projects independently of Attachmate. Two months later, Xamarin and Attachmate entered into an agreement, whereby Attachmate recognized Mono as an independent open project and granted Xamarin an indefinite right to use all intellectual property and trademarks related to the Mono project.
In February 2016, Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman sold their business to Microsoft, after which the Mono project changed its license from LGPLv2 to MIT and came under the management of the .NET Foundation, a nonprofit organization created by Microsoft. Previously proprietary extensions to Mono were also opened up, and commitments were made to ensure that Microsoft patents would not be used against individuals developing, using, selling, importing, or supplying Mono. Mono components were integrated with the first open release of the .NET Core platform.
Source: opennet.ru
