
Mono's Making Money - cek
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/xamarin-mono/
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tpatke
Miguel de Icaza is living the life right now. He managed to get Novell to fund
his idea and then effectively bought it off of them for a steal. Well done!

Incidentally, I think this is the best way to start a business if you ever
find yourself in the right position. Big companies are ditching / spinning off
successful products which are just not "successful enough" and you can often
pick them up for the cost of supporting existing customers.

~~~
xtracto
>Incidentally, I think this is the best way to start a business if you ever
find yourself in the right position. Big companies are ditching / spinning off
successful products which are just not "successful enough" and you can often
pick them up for the cost of supporting existing customers.

I surely would hope that the same think had happened to several of the Google
services that were killed a short time ago; specially Wave and Code Search.

Although I know that at least Wave was made given to Apache, I think what that
needed was a company that was willing to polish and provide the service.

~~~
mseebach
Problem with that is two things:

1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't
have if you're not Google.

2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a
profitable business off much harder.

~~~
quanticle
>1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't
have if you're not Google.

Not necessarily. At least with Google Wave [1], Google ensured that they made
the necessary modifications to allow users to run Wave servers by themselves.
There is at least one provider running wave-in-a-box [2], and there isn't any
reason that this provider should be the only one.

>2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning
a profitable business off much harder.

Harder yes, but it's still well short of impossible. I was thinking that the
Wave Federation Protocol could perhaps be monetized as a shared-
editing/collaboration service. It could be positioned as a combination of
Sharepoint and chat.

[1] [http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-
source-n...](http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-
steps-wave-in-box.html)

[2] <http://waveinabox.net/>

~~~
mseebach
The mechanism the OP referred to was picking up an existing product and
providing a more or less uninterrupted user experience. It's a great benefit
for a start-up to be able to hit the ground running with a user base and
traction.

In the case of Wave, there was a major gap between the product being declared
EOL from Google and until the various bits and pieces for running Wave as an
independent vendor was in place - and in that gap all reasonable people ran
away, so non-Google Wave offerings are starting from scratch.

As for money, no, certainly not impossible, but it's one more hurdle to
hitting the ground running.

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bravura
"As a result of garnering the rights to Mono and a solid customer base,
Xamarin wound up with self-sustaining revenue that covers its staff of some 50
people — without having taken on any venture capital."

That's pretty cool. From the article, it sounds like they were cash-flow
positive enough to support 50 people, _from the outset_.

~~~
tvon
To be fair the real outset was about a decade ago when they created Helix Code
(later renamed to Ximian) and started work on Mono.

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alexro
They now look like direct competitors to Microsoft - providing tools for iOS
and Android devs and kind of distracting them from W Phone. Do they have the
right kind of agreements to be sheltered from MS anger should it come?

~~~
DiabloD3
Miguel de Icaza works for Microsoft, and Microsoft has extended Mono
developers a patent license for all relevant C#/.NET patents,...

Except, said patent grant does not extend to people who don't work for de
Icaza, people who distribute Mono, or people who use Mono, or people who have
compiled C# apps with Mono.

Microsoft refuses to make Mono patent free, and anyone who distributes, uses,
or distributes binaries compiled with Mono _can and will be sued_.

Not only is de Icaza not a competitor to Microsoft, he is helping Microsoft
attack Linux and the Free Software movement.

Mono refuses to switch to a license, such as GPLv3, to protect users,
distributors, and developers from the patents; not only do they refuse, they
are getting rid of all GPLv2 code in favor of BSD code. Once Mono is BSDafied,
Microsoft can import all code from Mono and close source it within the main
C#/.Net implementation on Windows.

~~~
xradionut
If you don't want to be mistaken for a rabid OSS zealot, you should be more
knowledgable about Mono's license(s) and not fling RMS-poo around.

<http://www.mono-project.com/License>

The fact that C# programmers can code for multiple platforms thru easier
porting makes them more likely to explore OSS options instead of staying
solely in Redmonds garden.

~~~
DiabloD3
I see no patent grant that protects users, distributors, or non-Mono/Microsoft
developers.

So, again, how does that license protect open source? It is neither GPLv3 or
ASLv2, nor will Microsoft stop using patents to attack people.

I'm not sure how I can interpret it any other way. Being sued by Microsoft is
something no one wants.

~~~
JonoW
How is that different from any other OSS project? If MS wants, they could look
at a projects source code and decide that they've violated a patent and sue
them. To my knowledge they're yet to do this.

~~~
makomk
The difference is that Microsoft created .Net and the patents covering it
together, so they're fairly narrow patents and it'd be a hell of a lot harder
to find relevant prior art to use against them. (The same's true of OOXML,
incidentally; Microsoft even tried to get a patent covering both it and ODF
but the examiner narrowed it to just OOXML based on a huge amount of prior art
dating back to SGML in the 80s.)

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regularfry
It makes me unfeasibly happy that they have achieved a self-sustaining
business model. I wouldn't necessarily have predicted that I would feel this
way, but it makes me trust them more.

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alecthomas
I've never seriously used C# before, but the desire to build an iPhone
application, combined with my unfortunate distaste for Objective-C, recently
led me to MonoTouch.

MonoDevelop, MonoTouch, and C# have been an absolute pleasure to work with.
Completion is insanely fast, with fuzzy matching. C# delegates make
implementing event handlers a pleasure. The integration with Interface Builder
is a bit shaky at times, but I suspect that may be a bug in XCode.

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gexla
This is a great story about a project finding a way. It's also great story of
a team of talented developers being able to create a commercial force in very
little time. I suppose having a well oiled development team and a ton of
contacts for possible clients ready to go is a strong ingredient for quick
profits.

This makes me wonder what other projects in a similar situation could make a
similar jump.

If you are looking for a home in development but don't yet need to take the
plunge of finding a job. This is a good example of how an open source project
can create opportunities.

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jackfoxy
Some time ago I ran across a post saying Mono does not do true tail recursion
in F#. Does anyone know if this is still the case?

~~~
jackfoxy
Found this <http://www.mono-project.com/Release_Notes_Mono_2.10> Feb 15th,
2011

Under Runtime Notes _Improved tail-call support for the F# compiler._

Not enough information to determine if _improved_ means _fixed_.

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hristov
That's great. But, unfortunately, Mono is not making netflix run on my
computer. Now that would be an achievement.

~~~
cookiecaper
Netflix will not run on your Linux desktop because Microsoft refuses to issue
licenses for its DRM components for Moonlight/Linux desktop. These components
run fine on Linux -- look at Boxee et al -- but Microsoft refuses to license
the DRM for use on Linux desktops. While I would have thought the spite would
run deep enough to encourage a clean room implementation of MS's DRM, I guess
most people just don't care since there are so many alternate vehicles that
require less work for the same content.

~~~
untog
Is there a successful (and by that, I mean not entirely useless) DRM system
for Linux? I would imagine that MS would not want to provide the source for
their DRM component for fear of it being broken.

~~~
cookiecaper
Is there a successful DRM system for _anything_? Again, I think the DRM that
remains unbroken is unbroken because there's no point in cracking it. MS's
PlayReady protects music and movies, so there's no reason to crack it since
you can just rip the DVD/CD instead.

I don't think the argument that their DRM is exposed to a lot more risk by
presence on desktop Linux is legitimate. Someone can break it on Windows or
Mac without much extra effort if they cared to break it.

