What a surprise! Microsoft handing over the Mono Project to Wine devs. Even with a thank you.
What is it?
Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework to provide a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications.
Microsoft's Jeff Schwartz announced:
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!
Nice to see their acknowledgement of the Wine team and their work.
On the other hand he makes it very clear that it is outdated and everyone should switch to their modern fork. So yeah…
Yup. It sounds a lot like "let's get rid of old useless code we would have otherwise unceremoniously discarded by offloading it onto the FOSS community".
That way it sounds like they are being good and donating, instead of having to announce its closure and making it sound like being acquired killed the project.
Still, a little win for the FOSS Community!