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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team (www.mono-project.com)

submitted 2 months ago by pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1037504

The Mono Project (mono/mono) (‘original mono’) has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.

The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024.

We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono · GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.

Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork.

We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us.

Thank you to all the Mono developers!

Explanation of the differences between all the versions of mono from a Hacker News comment

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[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 51 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Here, maintain this for us, we don't want to pay anyone to do it"

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Sounds like it hasn’t had any updates in half a year (with the last major version over 5 years ago) and they’re now using their own runtime that’s included in .NET. Wine already had their own fork, so what is there to maintain?

[–] Templa@beehaw.org 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I think most comments here just want to shit on MS and don't even want to understand what is going on. Specially because Wine was already maintaining a fork of it.

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine-mono/mono

[–] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 30 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Boy, I sure wish some megacorporation would dump a massive codebase on me to maintain without any financial assistance!"

No one, ever

[–] sanzky@beehaw.org 7 points 2 months ago

they were already maintaining a fork of Mono for quite some time. This seems to me like a ceremonial torch passing to make them the 'official' owner of the project.

[–] AnomalousBit@programming.dev 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I wish somebody would donate Microsoft to the recycle bin

[–] xilliah@beehaw.org 3 points 2 months ago

It's too yucky to recycle

[–] Kissaki@beehaw.org 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork.

What's left for the mono project then? What's Wine's interest in it?

[–] Templa@beehaw.org 4 points 2 months ago

Wine Mono is a fork of Mono that Wine uses to run .NET Framework applications.

https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono

[–] sanzky@beehaw.org 4 points 2 months ago

Because Wine often needs to run .Net applications and Mono is the easiest way for them to do that.