Free .NET: Microsoft hands over Mono to Wine
Microsoft donates Mono to the Wine project. That sounds good – but skepticism is also warranted.
(Image: iX)
In future, Mono will be under the auspices of the Wine project: Microsoft is handing over the open source replica of the .NET framework to the developers of the Windows compatibility layer for other operating systems. However, Mono is an alternative to classic .NET, which Microsoft already regards as a legacy product – rather than .NET, which is already designed for cross-platform development.
Accordingly, Microsoft states in the announcement that active Mono users should migrate their applications to modern .NET. What's more, the latter is also based on the Mono project, as Microsoft took over the project together with Xamarin in 2016. It has always been under an open source license anyway, but Microsoft was able to completely rebuild its own framework with the newly acquired developers of the .NET clone. And according to Microsoft, this work is now officially complete.
It is therefore not surprising that Mono has been quiet in recent years – The last major release appeared five years ago, with only minor patches following since then. And even if Microsoft emphasizes the importance of Mono for the distribution of .NET on platforms other than Windows in the announcement, the question arises as to what significance the project can still have – Is Microsoft really giving the community a gift here or is the company merely getting rid of the maintenance of old code?
The full announcement can be found on the Mono project website.
(Image:Â Dmytro Vikarchuk/Shutterstock)
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