source: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/2226259/Attachmate-Fires-Mono-Developers
Is this news anything of concern?
I don’t think that it is an immediate concern. The current version of Mono will still work and until that becomes overly outdated Unity can continue using that.
I couldn’t tell from the article what will happen to the Mono project so I can’t really say anything in the long term. Switching frameworks would be difficult, but there is no guarantee that they will even have to do that so I don’t see any reason to speculate. If they do it might be similar to the possible solutions that they came up with for the iOS 4 terms of agreement scare.
I can’t really find a positive light when parsing the statement from Attachmate quoted in the blog.
Short term it won’t have any effect (in my opinion). The big question is whether Mono can be forked. According to wikipedia, it can, based on its license.
Also, if I understand correctly, UT maintains their own branch of Mono?
Yes they do, here’s a link to it on github.
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/mono
However, fixing targeted platform issues such as for the MacAppStore compliance once or twice a year is a far cry from Unity taking over the entire mono project. I don’t quite see that happening.
There seems to be celebration in the Linux community over the news.
The conversations on twitter seem to mirror the same sentiments. Mono is evil! Good Riddance! Evil Microsoft stuff!
Simple, have UT take over ownership of Mono
Well the ShiVa 3D devs, from what I understand, maintain their own version of Lua (called Stone Script), and the engine has the ability to take the Lua script and compile it to native c++ code.
The folks at Havok have their own “optimized version of Lua” called Havok Script.
So it’s not unusual for a game engine developer to maintain their own scripting language, UDK of course has its own scripting language.
Pretty sure Unity has that too, with UnityScript. I’m not sure what the actual ShiVa 3d engine is coded in, but I don’t think its Lua… I think that ShiVa’s StoneScript would be more analogous to Unity’s UnityScript, not Mono.
Mono isn’t a scripting language.
–Eric
I should have said “scripting language engine”, i.e. engine developers maintain their own scripting language engine. Unity is written in C++ and it uses the Mono platform to do C# scripting. ShiVa 3D is written in C++ and it uses Lua Runtime(engine whatever you want to call it) to do Lua scripting.
We don’t need a 101 on how to write game engines here! This topic is about the Mono platform and its future.
This is indeed terrible news. I do hate all this OS fanatism. People don’t seam to realize when a technology is good, no matter who made it, or do these guys also think Kinect sucks just because MS made it? Well…
It’s not even a scripting language engine; there’s more to it than that. It’s a bit much for UT to be taking a project of that magnitude on.
–Eric
Mono is a monster, it is not a scripting engine, it is not a scripting language, it is a re-write of certain framework libraries that works natively cross platform to help to do the same work that the framework libraries did. It is in essance, a rewrite of those managed libraries, it is nothing simple to duplicate, it is not work easly chucked to the wind, it is power beyond measure. Microsoft makes it so that you write a program that needs libraries and without those, your programs do not work, mono allows you to be portable. There is so much more to this than a simple ‘gone with the wind’, this is a big deal.
If I win the lotto, I will hire the entire team and take on the project, that is how big and powerful it is.
Yes of course, because we’re talking about a complete platform here. So yeah it’s not a just a scripting language engine we’re talking about. Notice this problem is unique to Unity only. All others, ShiVa 3D, Havok (yes I know it’s only a physics engine), CryEngine all have their own “scripting language engine” that they maintain. Because they simply use Lua. Same thing with Unreal Engine, they only need to maintain a scripting language engine, not a platform.
I’ve thought about this issue a long time ago actually. That Unity using the Mono Project can lead to problems down the road, because of its high maintenance.
I try to avoid the forums, but I wouldn’t post this topic if I didn’t think it was important.
Your not understanding, remove the whole “scripting language” verbage and direction of thought out of this, this has nothing to do with scripting at all. This has to do with the core of Unity that allows it to run on Mac, they can easily make it (if they haven’t already) so that it works on Windows without Mono by using native libraries without Mono, but Mono is currently needed for it to work on Mac. You have to understand what Mono is and why people use it to understand the scope to the loss of it.
The Mono runtime is a part of the Unity engine, and yes Mono is needed for Unity to be multiplatform. Not just on Mac, but all other platforms that Unity supports. Of course if Unity supported native Microsoft .NET then Unity would run on Windows only, not even on any other Microsoft platform (like Xbox). That’s the point of the Mono Project which is to provide a multiplatform implementation of .NET.
Guys, does it really matter? You are derailing this topic so much…
No derailing, it is about Mono getting sunk by its core creator company, what mono is and how it effects Unity is on topic and yes it really matters.
Very simply, Mono makes cross platform development easy thanks to standardising to a well thought out basis. If you’ve spent time with cross platform libraries you’ll realize that most of them suck donkey balls and are written by complete educated morons with no concept of OOP or even legibility. If there’s one thing that MS tends to do well it’s make good dev tools, if they ever decided on their own to step into the cross platform development market then they’d have a monopoly with months and extremely powerful leverage to control and endanger competitions growth.
So Mono is a double edged sword. Fantastic it brings standardization, a well thought out design and a massive cross platform library that makes development a doddle anywhere, but not so fantastic that if MS ever decided to pull the plug and enforce their patents they could completely cripple the competition which has become dependent on it.
Personally I’m sad to see this go. While Monodevelop is pretty shoddy Mono itself was fantastically useful. This has got to be very worrying for the guys at UT, maybe they have the finances to hire up the coders and carry on development in their own branch to keep it all going.