On: Major upgrades to Xamarin’s platform: Async is here

They are more concerned about making money like MSFT than making world a better place.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Xamarin staff have given the world so much; I'd say billion+ dollar industry was built on the back of their labor. About time Miguel et al profited.

I agree that it's nothing wrong in making money. All the work should be paid.

However, their license makes their technology a niche product, when it could have been the main way mobile applications are developed.

> could have been the main way mobile applications are developed

is this so bad? I see at a competitive advantage to use their platform.

I'd rather ship 1.0 and 2.0 quickly to learn from customers than focus on the one true way to build mobile applications.

> However, their license makes their technology a niche product

Does not seem very niche to me.

The price starts at $300 per person per platform per year, and that applies to you right now should you decide to build anything that involves more than a few kilobytes of code.

Nobody's going to pick up Xamarin for fun, for experimentation, for learning, for scratching a creative itch. You can't download it for your kids or recommend it to your students. They have no product for use outside of companies and that guarantees it will be and die a niche riding on companies not wanting to retrain their .NET developers for iOS and Android.

Earlier this month I got to choose between Xamarin and everything else, I have years of C# experience and I like their IDE for general c#-on-mac stuff.

I chose Haxe instead.

They tried the "make the world a better place too".

Actually Miguel started the Gnome project, wrote Gnumeric, sponsored Evolution, etc.

Even Mono was once to be used in Linux and Gnome.

They were forced off Gnome, by valid license concerns, FUD, zealots and not few indiffrence.

What are they to do? Roll over and die?

I have nothing against Miguel and Mono. I just wanted to say that a product which is going to win the market, should be really open source and really free. People would choose PhoneGap for multi-platform mobile development over Mono.Touch because it has a friendlier license and leads to less risks.