Microsoft announced the transfer of the Mono project, which is developing an alternative implementation of the .NET platform, under the wing of the WineHQ organization, which is developing an open implementation of the Win32 API. Microsoft took over the Mono project after acquiring Xamarin in 2016. Based on the Mono platform, it was planned to develop tools for developing mobile applications in C# using .NET technologies, but over time the project fell into stagnation and no significant releases have been released since 2019, although corrective updates continued to be published regularly.
Since Mono was used in Wine to run the compiled for Windows For .NET-based executables, Wine developers maintained a synchronized fork of Wine Mono, which was successfully maintained and regularly updated. After assessing the situation, Microsoft decided to hand over the main Mono project to the Wine community and make the Wine Mono repository the primary one. The code in the old Mono repository will be preserved but archived. Previously created builds will remain available for four years.
At the same time, having transferred the original Mono to Wine, Microsoft will continue to support the more modern fork Mono Runtime, included in the code base of the open .NET platform. It is planned to gradually transfer components of Microsoft projects that remain tied to Mono to this fork. Microsoft also said it is recommending that users of applications that use Mono migrate to the common .NET framework that includes the Mono Runtime.
The Mono platform was founded in 2001 by Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman, who founded Ximian to develop their projects. In 2003, Ximian was sold to Novell and the first release of Mono 1.0, released in 2004, was prepared by Novell. In 2011, as a result of restructuring carried out after the purchase of Novell by Attachmate Corporation, 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, independent of the Attachmate holding company. Two months later, Xamarin and Attachmate entered into an agreement under which Attachmate recognized Mono as an independent open source project and gave Xamarin the perpetual right to use all intellectual property and trademarks associated with 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 non-profit organization .NET Foundation created by Microsoft. It also opened up previously separately distributed proprietary extensions to Mono and provided covenants that Microsoft patents would not be enforced against anyone developing, using, selling, importing, or shipping Mono. Mono components were integrated with the first open source release of the .NET Core platform.
Source: opennet.ru
