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Miguel De Icaza Forms New Mono Company: Xamarin
rubycodez writes "After being thrown out on the streets by Attachmate, the purchasers of Novell, Miguel De Icaza has formed a new company Xamarin to make .NET development tools for Android and iOS. The company will also provide commercial international Mono support. There are those who would say Mono poses a risk of drawing Microsoft patent or other IP litigation for its inclusion in some major Linux distributions, and that these recent events might be the beginning of the demise of widespread use of Mono and other .NETiness in open source software, a good thing."
They failed in their first attempt at making Mono a ubiquitous development platform by keeping their mobile ports behind a paywall. Now they lost access to those proprietary parts and decided to start again, in exactly the same fashion... brilliant.
This brings on the specter of legal action by Attachmate. While there has always been the thought that Mono could be sued by Microsoft, such as lawsuit would require Microsoft convincing a court that it was “just kidding” and the CLR/C# patent covenants are non-binding. Between their obligations to the ECMA standards body and the legal principal of equitable estoppel, the chance of this happening is slim to none. Attachmate is a completely different story. Even if they aren’t supporting it, they do own a product that is in direct competition with Xamarin’s future offerings. Without some sort of legal arrangement between Attachmate and Xamarin, the latter would face the daunting prospect of proving that their new development doesn’t use any the technology that the old one did. As a result of this, as well as the general uncertainty of any new product, some developers on the mono-android mailing list are stating that they are moving back to Java development for now. Source: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/Mono-II
...that the submitter should just state his opinion rather than hiding behind weasel words.
It is not a "good thing" to have Mono or .NET interoperability taken out of reach of Linux users. Interoperability layers such as Mono allow Linux systems to participate in networks that are dominated by Windows and other commercial systems. If it weren't for software like this, Linux systems may not be invited into some corporate networks, and would not get a seat at the table.
The idea of a "pure" linux or no linux is going to continue having linux sitting out in the cold all by itself. Interoperability is crucial.
If anything, we need more software like Mono, not less.
If it's under the GPL and LGPL, it's going to be a rough case Attachmate would be making, considering that it's open licensed and they just kicked the team to the curb.
The FOSS code is not a concern here.
The issue is the proprietary code that Miguel et al worked on in Novell, the Android and iPhone runtimes. That is owned by Attachmate now, and this new startup contains exactly the same coders, who are intentionally going to write the exact same product from scratch - they will be 100% "source compatible" with the old runtimes.
So legalities are a reasonable concern. Even if no code is copied, the same people writing the same product - immediately after writing it the first time - may lead to basically the same code being written. It might be hard to prove no code was copied even if none was. Lawsuits are filed for much less.
Of course, this only matters if Xamarin is a big success - no one sues a failure. Time will tell.