

Is Mono dead? Is Novell dying? - Garbage
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/is-mono-dead-is-novell-dying/8821

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latch
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.

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HardyLeung
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!

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cageface
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.

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wladimir
"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.

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smcj
> Look carefully, there is no lack of VMs in OSS.

There is just a lack of good ones, though.

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lvh
What makes VMs like Luajit, Pypy, V8 and Tracemonkey/Jaegermonkey either not
"good" or not "OSS"?

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cageface
I wouldn't call them not "good", but they're not the same kind of universal
platform that the JVM is. They all pretty much serve one language.

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wladimir
That's true. Most try to focus on one language, instead of including
everything.

LLVM might be closest to an universal open source JIT platform. It is used as
the backend of many of the language-specific VMs.

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SoftwareMaven
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 ;).

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ericHosick
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.

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kjetil
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.

