Never like seeing people laid off (fired's a different story), but Mono never made sense to me. I can imagine that it was a hard thing to pitch internally to the new owners.
I'm 1/2 surprised MS doesn't just announce it'll continue with development and hire the existing team. If they don't (because they still could), this seems like the real story here...step up and put your money where your mouth is.
Amen. In fact, Microsoft should hire the Mono team, redouble the open source effort, integrate Mono Droid and Mono Touch into Visual Studio and offer them for free (like VS Express). This looks like an easy way to attract app developers to the all-encompassing Microsoft platforms, and help make Windows Phone an equal of iPhone and Android... This could be a major win!
If there's a bright side in this for any of the Mono people, at least they won't have to live in Provo anymore.
I never agreed with the goals of the Mono project but nevertheless I have a lot of respect for the intelligence and dedication of everybody involved. If they have indeed been let go I offer my condolences and wish them luck.
If this is true and Mono is in the tank and the JVM under uncertain stewardship with Oracle it seems the OSS world might be in need of a new VM.
"Javascript with JIT" seems to be the most popular new VM. I loathe to admit it, but I at the moment it appears that's where most GUI scripting will go eventually.
Apart from that, there is of course PyPy, which is "Python with JIT", and probably many more. Look carefully, there is no lack of VMs in OSS.
Personally, I don't like the heavy Java and C# VMs at all.
Browser javascript VMs seem to be much more lightweight, which is good for interactive clients, and lately with NodeJS they gain a lot of momentum server-side too.
I've done a lot of work using Mono and consider it a huge plus to the Open Source community. The fact I could hack at the core of C# Mono (change the object class for example) was so cool (and on a Mac to boot). I really don't want to see something like this happen. There is so much more I want to write right now about this but will digress.
I talked with several employees pre-close of the deal, and nobody expected what happened, to the point I would question if they were actively mislead.
Novell and Word Perfect laid the foundation for Utah's technology sector. It has been painful to see what came of too much success. Maybe my company will be the next one (to succeed, that is ;).
I know cross-platform solutions carry a lot of stigma, but MonoTouch is the most compelling solution I've seen to reuse code across iOS, Android and WP7.
I'm 1/2 surprised MS doesn't just announce it'll continue with development and hire the existing team. If they don't (because they still could), this seems like the real story here...step up and put your money where your mouth is.