

Mono Developers start their own company - jstedfast
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/May-16.html

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selectnull
It's awesome to see open source teams truly believe in what they do and stand
up against, in lack of better name, "classic business model". First Jenkins
CI, now Mono.

I wish you all the best guys...

~~~
jstedfast
thanks! We appreciate all the love!

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erikpukinskis
For those who didn't catch it, the "International Mono Support" aside is a
reference to Miguel's earlier (first?) company, "International Gnome Support",
renamed to Helix Code, then Ximian, and eventually purchased by Novell.

It's awesome to see Miguel running a scrappy startup again. I just read
through an old interview with him and Nat from the old IGF days, and Miguel
hasn't lost any of the hacker/entrepreneur spirit:

<http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=6967>

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zbowling
Former Mono contributor myself from 2006-2008. Crazy day. It won't die. To
many companies are invested in it. I always wished it would spin off earlier.

I wanted to meet up with Miguel when he was in SF a few days ago, but now I
know why he was so busy.

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teyc
You know, I was an early skeptic of Mono. After all, what use is a copycat
technology stack?

I'm later to admit how wrong I was. Suddenly mono was deploying into iOS,
Android and places where the existing developer ecosystem couldn't have
otherwise.

A hearty congratulations and wish you all the best. You deserve it.

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bfrog
I am confused by this. If attachmate let go of Mono developers clearly it felt
the product has not been profitable and won't be any time soon.

What investor with a sound mind would feel otherwise? Novell had already
dumped millions in to it and look where they ended up.

~~~
joeshaw
I'm not sure you can make this assumption. Attachmate seems most interested in
cutting Novell down to the bone and extracting whatever value it can from what
is left. I don't see a whole lot of future growth opportunity from that
company in the long term. Just because Mono is not necessarily profitable now
doesn't mean that it couldn't be cultivated into a profitable company later.
Mono seemed to be recently finding its niche with its Unity (games) licensing
and its MonoTouch and Mono for Android products.

(Disclaimer: I used to work at Ximian and Novell with Miguel & others, and
contributed some to Mono in the early days.)

~~~
mambodog
What do you mean about Unity? Unity Technologies is a separate company. Do
they pay (a significant amount) to licence the tech?

~~~
joeshaw
Unity uses Mono for scripting in their engine. As it runs on a variety of
platforms where replacing the runtime (which is normally LGPL licensed) isn't
possible, I believe they have a commercial licensing agreement in place with
Novell.

I don't know what the terms are of that agreement.

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jimbobimbo
THIS is the company Microsoft needs to fund. Not Skype or Nokia.

~~~
josephcooney
In an ideal world, yes. But from a strategic point of view monotouch/monodroid
(or whatever their new equivalents will be called) don't really help MS, it
just helps developers from the MS stack port their skills to other platforms.
If developer division didn't have the 'strategy tax' of being part of MS
they'd probably be trying to do this themselves (re-targeting their tools to
support development on alternate platforms). So in a way MONO helps MS by
helping MS customers that MS can't help directly themselves. If there was a
corporate equivalent of the relationship status "it's complicated" that's what
I'd be using to describe the relationship between MS and the MONO project, but
the rub is I don't think MS will be funding Monotouch/monodroid stuff any time
soon.

~~~
cwbrandsma
I thought Microsoft did help fund the project when it was part of Novel. In
the end, having a healthy .net community is in Microsoft's best interest, even
if there is not a direct set of sales involved.

~~~
josephcooney
I know they (MS) had an engineering agreement with the MONO folks while they
were at Novell re:Silverlight, but I don't know of any instances where they've
donated money. If you've got any links please share them.

From the Moonlight FAQ:
<http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/moonlight_faq.html#j>

_This collaboration between Microsoft and Novell is a formal engineering
development program. Novell is bringing the .NET-based Silverlight framework
to Mono, an open source framework for running .NET applications on multiple
platforms including Linux. Microsoft is providing a version of the necessary
codecs for Linux._

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equark
Doesn't look like the Mono guys were able to keep the key IP. That's too bad.
It's hard to see what Attachmate gains by keeping it.

~~~
escoz
My guess is it simply takes a lot of time/money to get IP issues solved, which
the mono guys don't have.. they would rather rebuild it than wait indefinitely
for those things to be resolved.

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c4urself
Any one have any statistics on Mono or know companies that use it, always
wondered about Mono usage. What are some use cases?

~~~
m_myers
My first thought is to run ASP.NET on a Linux server.

Also, some Gnome apps are written in C#:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Software_develo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_\(software\)#Software_developed_with_Mono)

~~~
mattmanser
Really? You gotta be pretty damn tight to deal with that nightmare I imagine.

I'd be more inclined to guess it sees more use in shops that are .Net but want
to use something like a memcached or redis server and want to write small
utilities on that server in a language they know.

Pure speculation though.

~~~
julianz
Fogbugz (<http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/>) on Linux runs under Mono. We use
it. It works well.

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sapper2
MS should support them with some funding.

~~~
mbreese
It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the
rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a
company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for
them to sue.

~~~
bullseye
Microsoft applied the "Community Promise" to the ECMA C# and CLI standards a
couple of years ago.

<http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx>

~~~
tytso
For C# and the core language, yes. But not anything higher on the .NET stack.
Novell had some patents that was able to hold Microsoft at bay. But since
Novell sold off their patent portfolio, who knows?

Personally, I wouldn't touch Mono would a ten foot pole, but that's just
me....

------
there
his former company was called ximian, which was started to do commercial gnome
development. this new company is called xamarin to do commercial mono
development. those are some pretty confusing names.

~~~
m_myers
From "simian" and "tamarin" in keeping with the monkey (mono) theme,
presumably.

~~~
sh4na
yup, that's exactly it

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euroclydon
Has something happened since Apple implemented the no interpreters rule?
Didn't Apple outlaw MonoTouch?

~~~
dhimes
Thank you for asking this. I came here to ask it. I'm not sure why you were
downvoted for it (I assume that's why the comment has been dimmed). Sometimes
I don't think I recognize HN. It's a shame, and I hope it doesn't keep you
from asking questions here.

~~~
jordan0day
I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing the reason it was downvoted (if it was,
I never saw it dimmed) was because the whole "section 3.2.2" thing seems to
have been settled around a year or so ago. That is, anyone who was concerned
about it being a problem should probably know by now that it ended up being
resolved and left MonoTouch unaffected. For a lot of folks I presume it's "old
news" and some folks may just think euroclydon is trying to spread FUD.

~~~
euroclydon
No FUD here. I remember the 3.2.2 thing being news that transcended the realm
of just iOS developers, but the resolution, I don't remember that at all.

A year, wow, it doesn't seem like that long ago!

~~~
dhimes
I don't remember it either, probably because I decided that I would just try
to make my website work well on mobile and skip the app altogether. Became
convinced of this strategy when A decided to take 30% of my sales through an
app also (or did they rescind that also?).

Anyway, downvoting without comment on something like this is poor.

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Todd
This is the best news I've heard all week. Huge congratulations to Miguel and
the entire Mono team!

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senex
Does anybody know how they'll be funded over the next few years?

~~~
mdeicaza
We should break even from the proprietary products, plus the consulting and
support services.

That being said, we want to grow, we want to market, we want to expand, and
for that we will be raising VC funds.

~~~
darklajid
Great to see you here.

Any plans to have a 'Team' section for Xamarin? I'd love to know who jumped on
board, tbh.

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thepumpkin1979
How many of the former Novell developers will work in Xamarin?

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motters
I guess this is a make or break moment for the Mono project. Who owns the
copyright on Mono anyway - is it individual developers?

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sktrdie
startup + opensource = fun!

~~~
patrickg
If you have enough money for the first days/weeks/months/years.

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nathanielksmith
I still fail to see the commercial/hobbyist/* appeal of C#/.NET/mono.

