

Attachmate lays off Mono employees - thesethings
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2011/05/attachmate-lays-off-mono-emplo.html

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zbowling
Mono contributor (circa 2005-2006) here. They didn't axe the entire team.
Still going strong. Mono had a number of people working on different sides and
only part of the team was let go as part of Attachmate restructuring of the
SuSE group.

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munchhausen
Sensationalism at its best is at work here. Attachmate/Novell laid off a lot
of employees in the US today, and "internetnews.com" goes on to extrapolate
that "Today Attachmate laid off an unknown number of U.S. based Novell
developers that were working on the open source Mono project". Indeed, the
number is unknown - it may as well be zero.

~~~
darklajid
IRC confirms that the number is at least 1 (and after knowing that I
extrapolate that there is some truth in that headline).

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johns
"unknown number of U.S. based Novell developers that were working on the open
source Mono project." does not mean the entire team was laid off. Second, no
source is cited and this is unconfirmed as of yet. I think people should calm
down with the speculation until something official happens.

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jsprinkles
Why would anybody do that when a chance to disparage Mono is presented?

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blub
Puzzling indeed, we should look for the positive aspects in this situation.

For instance when Nokia chose WP7 and C# over MeeGo and Qt, which lead to
layoffs, resignations and other unpleasant consequences, Miguel DeIcaza looked
for the positive aspects and declared that Nokia is simplifying the mobile
landscape. [1] Similarly, we could now say that Attachmate is simplifying the
cross-platform toolkit landscape...

[1] <http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-14.html>

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phren0logy
Is it premonition or self-fulfilling prophecy that most open-source developers
felt a little queasy about Mono?

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jsprinkles
FUD, actually. I did not see giving up and using past tense terms to describe
OpenOffice when Oracle bought Sun and things did not go the way the community
wanted. The community simply routed around. What makes Mono different? How
does this news mean anything for Mono at all aside from people not getting
paid to work on it?

Does the anti-Mono crowd just lay in wait for a negative story to further
disseminate FUD? I've used Mono a few times and I just do not understand the
treatment of Miguel and the project. The only answer I have ever deduced is
that Mono is rooted in a Microsoft technology and the anti-Mono crowd
apparently hates Microsoft.

~~~
phren0logy
Well, perhaps I jumped the gun on declaring it dead, but my question stands.
As far as I can tell, C# provides a lot of nice features. Despite that fact,
it seems to be as MS-only as Objective-C is Apple-only. No technical reason
for either, but it seems strong in the open-source culture.

~~~
darklajid
I don't get that. You say that C# provides a lot of nice features. Mono offers
a C# compiler.

ObjC is for Apple only, because \- they more or less control the field and
push it hard there \- other implementations lack the ecosystem \- other
implementations are far behind

Mono gained quite a lot of traction (F-Spot, Banshee, Tomboy) on Linux, so far
that it even allowed to 'backport' former Linux-only apps to Windows and OS X.
You get the nice features C# provides, even if you are not on Windows. And you
can rely on the same framework _.

_ : Except when you don't: WPF is the biggest example, other areas might lag
behind as well. But you _can_ write software for multiple systems _or_ focus
on Mono (Gtk#, Mono.Posix/Mono.Unix) only to rapidly write software on Linux.

~~~
phren0logy
I don't think I expressed myself very well. I'm saying that despite the nice
features of C# that Mono brings to the table, it doesn't appear to have seen
wide adoption. That's all. I didn't realize Tomboy was written in C#; that's
great. I understand what Mono is, and that's why I'm confused that there don't
seem to more (or at least, more _visible_ ) projects using it.

~~~
jimmyjazz14
You might check out <http://www.mono-project.com/Software> and
<http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono>

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Stormbringer
From an article back in 09 when Miguel joined Microsoft's Open Source
Foundation:

 _"That’s just what I was saying Linux needed the other day: more Silverlight
applications. In fact, I was discussing how promoting Silverlight development
in no way whatsoever helps Microsoft lock-in, and quite the contrary actually
encourages the spread of software freedom under every definition known to
mankind. Because it is Microsoft that is internationally recognized for
leverging its considerable power to promote user freedom and interoperability
through its file formats and development technologies we absolutely need more
of that being produced in the Linux world, which tends to use proprietary and
obscured formats and languages"_

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evo_9
I really wish I'd never bought MonoTouch, I think a refund should be available
to us that bought it less than a year ago.

~~~
jimmyjazz14
I think you might be jumping the gun here a little, nobody said any major
changes will be happening to the Mono project, this article has not even been
confirmed yet.

~~~
evo_9
It's not just this. The lack of a clear plan/solution for going forward
regarding the new Xcode/IB single IDE; the solution to keep using the previous
version just isn't ideal. I've seen a few times in the past 6 months where
major changes dropped and users were asking for really basic info/response on
forums and got nothing. I'm just going to stick it out with obj-c.

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escoz
they have already announced that they're working on xcode 4 integration, and
just today one of the developers for MonoDevelop released a video showing that
integration working.

~~~
evo_9
Good to know, but poking around the monotouch website I don't see anything
about this. I'd think this would be on the frontpage or the news section at
the very least. Nothing about it in community either. Little things like this
(not being able to find valuable info) really does kill motivation to work on
this otherwise fun/interesting platform.

~~~
icey
If you're still looking for the video:
<http://twitter.com/#!/migueldeicaza/status/65513868599902208>

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yuhong
Personally I really hope that the MS-Novell deal will not be renewed.

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eropple
_Why_ should it not be renewed? I ask because, frankly, I am skeptical that
you have the technical or legal backing to have an informed enough opinion to
legitimately hold such a hope--and there's a surprising amount of FUD (no
small amount perpetuated by Groklaw) about it.

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known
<http://mono-project.com/Compatibility> shows Mono is as good as MS .Net

