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Attachmate Does the Right Thing For Mono

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the being-good-is-good dept.

mikejuk writes "Attachmate, who recently decided to dump the Mono development team, has done the right thing in allowing Miguel de Icaza's new company, Xamarin, a perpetual license to all the intellectual property of Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono for Visual Studio. This allows them to continue to develop and sell the products. Of course this income might just give them the time needed to support the software, which is a good thing, as Attachmate has also handed over the support for all existing customers to Xamarin."

15 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, it WAS the right thing. by mswhippingboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whether or not you think Mono has value, granting a perpetual license to it to someone who will do something with it was the right thing to do. Allowing a particular technology to be continued rather than just sitting on it because they have no use for it should be applauded. I only wish IBM had done this with OS/2 many years ago. Who knows what would have become of it.

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    Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
    1. Re:Yes, it WAS the right thing. by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I fear OS/2 was a failure for the desktop as soon as they did the Adds for OS/2 Warp. A bunch of people staring at a computer screen saying how cool it is then showing some funky color like they are on an acid trip. Most people at the time didn't know what an OS was they figured that once you turn on your PC you go to DOS prompt... then there were GUI enhancements like Windows 3.1. Earlier versions of OS/2 were the same way... seeming just a shell on top of DOS. So OS/2 Warp just an another expensive DOS Shell, that ran DOS Slower and all those newly available windows apps wouldn't all run at 100%.

      When Microsoft released Windows 95 at nearly the same time, they did what apple does now. Show the product, show them how to use it, make it seem so much easier then before and what the other guys do. So when people got windows 95 they knew what it was and what it was going to do.

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      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:Yes, it WAS the right thing. by mswhippingboy · · Score: 4, Informative

      When Microsoft released Windows 95 at nearly the same time, they did what apple does now. Show the product, show them how to use it, make it seem so much easier then before and what the other guys do. So when people got windows 95 they knew what it was and what it was going to do.

      No, OS/2 was superior to Win95 in nearly every way at the time. The reason for OS/2 demise had little to nothing to do with technology, but a combination of the "somewhat questionable" tactics MS used to force PC vendors to pre-install Win95 on every box shipped, and the ineptness of IBM's marketing.

      --
      Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
    3. Re:Yes, it WAS the right thing. by thammoud · · Score: 2

      No, OS/2 was superior to Win95 in nearly every way at the time.

      Not true. As much as I liked OS/2, it had that nasty single message queue problem that Win95 did not. IBM tried many kludges but they rarely worked.

  2. Re:Bullshit by halivar · · Score: 2

    Thankfully, the ecosystem of computer languages and platforms is not subject to the mouth-frothing whims of hard-core ideologues. Those of us who program for a living are not interested in your rants.

  3. You know what would have been cool? by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If Palm did this with BeOS back about 5-6 years ago. BeOS didn't really compete with them. It did, however, compete with their biggest contemporary competitor and one of their future competitors that they should have seen would soon be a major rival. Had Palm given Haiku developers the same deal with BeOS, it would have been as disruptive for Microsoft and Apple as if a little enemy state were to hit the US with a high altitude EMP on a weekday.

  4. Re:[Open]SUSE by mswhippingboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Mono and by extension .net is a piece of shit and the only people who care are shills and the people that have been convinced by the shills to believe the hype. Even MS is abandoning .shit for javascript/html5 in their next OS. Hahahahahahaha

    Well done. I too would post as AC if all I had to say was an idiotic, embarrassingly stupid comment like that.

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    Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
  5. Xamarin? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why not just call it Ximian rev. 2.0?

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    #DeleteChrome
  6. Re:[Open]SUSE by pavon · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, SuSE is one of the main reasons that Attachemate bought Novel. They have moved the SuSE headquarters back to Nuremberg Germany where it began, and the relationship with the OpenSUSE project is not expected to change.

  7. Good Will by DeeEff · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not something you see often nowadays, what with patents and copyrights being thrown back and forth in endless litigation and cutthroat corporate espionage.

    That said, these guys are pretty awesome for doing that. In a way it lets us know they actually care about the improvement of the industry, even if they couldn't support Mono themselves. Round of applause ol' gents.

    1. Re:Good Will by Raenex · · Score: 2

      Without being privy to the agreement, I wouldn't assume it was "good will". If anything, it's probably just a business agreement where Attachmate stands to benefit if Xamarin succeeds. If they really wanted to be "good will" about it, they would provide royalty-free licensing to everybody instead of just Xamarin.

  8. Re:[Open]SUSE by Creepy · · Score: 2

    as trolling as that was, it does seem to have a bit of truth - Microsoft has kicked Silverlight to the curb by targeting it pretty much only for mobile and news from inside Microsoft seems to indicate they are ditching .NET for html 5. Knowing Microsoft, however, and seeing their open attack on the security of WebGL, I expect them to port over their Silverlight Direct 3D code and use that instead of using WebGL because a browser without proprietary features would be very un-Microsofty.

    The thing that isn't often mentioned, however, is that Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight being compiled into html/javascript at their developer conference (or so I have heard) - that would be nice, and very un-Microsoft of them - write in Silverlight/.NET and run on html 5 browsers. Still, I bet proprietary tech gets in there as I mentioned above, and if so, Miguel's work will still be relevant.

  9. special hell by girlintraining · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm going to the special hell for this, but I misread the headline as "Attachment does the right thing for mono", and I thought to myself -- attachment is what causes mono. Well, that and kissing. Then I realized I was on slashdot, and nobody would get the joke...

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    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  10. Re:[Open]SUSE by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 2

    How do we know you didn't? You are the MS whipping boy after all?

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    May the Maths Be with you!
  11. Mono for phones is expensive by tepples · · Score: 2

    you think the work involved in those separate platforms should not be compensated?

    No, I think $650 for the bundle is a bit too steep for a microISV. As of right now, the best way I can see for a small developer to get a cross-platform phone application in front of an audience is to write the back-end in C++, write front-ends in Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android, and ignore Windows Phone 7.