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Microsoft has donated the Mono project, an open-source framework that has enabled the integration of its .NET platform with non-Windows systems, to the Wine community. WineHQ will be the upstream code manager for the Mono project, while Microsoft will encourage Mono-based applications to migrate to its open-source .NET framework.
As Microsoft notes on the Mono project homepage, the last major release of Mono was in July 2019. Mono was “a pioneer of the .NET platform across many operating systems” and was the first implementation of .NET on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems.
Ximian, Novell, SUSE, Xamarin, Microsoft, now Wine
Mono began as a project by Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the GNOME desktop. De Icaza led Ximian (originally Helix Code), which aimed to port Microsoft’s new .NET platform to Unix-like platforms. Ximian was acquired by Novell in 2003.
Mono played a key role in de Icaza’s efforts to bring Silverlight, a browser plug-in for “interactive multimedia applications” (i.e., a competitor to Flash), to Linux systems. Novell promoted Mono as a way to develop iOS applications with C# and other .NET languages. Microsoft applied its “community promise” to its .NET standards in 2009, confirming its willingness to let Mono flourish outside of its specific control.
However, by 2011, Novell, which was about to be acquired and was becoming obsolete, had little to do with Mono, and de Icaza launched Xamarin to promote Mono for Android. Novell (through its subsidiary SUSE) and Xamarin struck a deal where Xamarin would take over the IP and customers, using Mono within Novell/SUSE.
Microsoft opened up most of .NET’s sources in 2014, then went further by acquiring Xamarin entirely in 2016, placing Mono under an MIT license, and bundling Xamarin’s offerings into various open source projects. Mono now exists as a repository that may one day be archived, though Microsoft promises to keep the binaries for at least four years. Those who want to continue using Mono are directed to Microsoft’s “modern fork” of the project within .NET.
What does this mean for Mono and Wine? Not much at first. Wine, a compatibility layer for Windows applications on POSIX-compliant systems, has already used Mono code in patches and has its own Mono engine. By donating Mono to Wine, Microsoft has, at the very least, erased the last worry anyone might have had about the company’s control over the project. This is a very different, open-source Microsoft making this decision, of course, but regardless, it’s a good move.
