The Uncertain future of Mono?

News & General Discussion
1

Ok so I’m sure at least some of us have heard that Novell (the developers of the opensource crossplatform version of Microsoft.Net framework a.k.a Mono on which Unity’s awesome scripting is based) has been acquired by Attachmate. If you want to find out more read this

Attachmate has no plans of supporting the Mono project despite it’s huge success as a cross platform dev. solution. The founder of the mono project has formed a new company to continue developing Mono still as an opensource platform. Without the the financial backing from Novell however, will mean tougher days ahead for Mono: either a slow down in it’s development or worst case- the project grinds to a halt. To make things worse, the opensource dev community has generally not shown so much interest (compared to other opensource initiatives) because it’s got Microsoft written all over it. This generally means bad news for us Unity devs. It means no more support for the latest .Net/CLR features.

So what’s the point of all of the blabbing above? Not much, just a suggestion. since unity makes such heavy use of the Mono framework, wouldn’t it be nice if they sponsored it’s further development still as an opensource project? Just wanted to get opinions on this.

2

This issue is already resolved, and it is open source and developed again.

3

Has it? there have been other opensource .Net port initiatives that have failed for one reason or another; case in point Portable.NET. What if Xamarin fails to gain the critical mass needed to support the project. Remember, it’s still a start up which means the future is still uncertain.

4

It’s certain simply because if anything, unity would do it themselves like they’ve been doing since 2009, when they branched from the main mono hub. Since then it’s been unity’s own stuff. They can at this point pretty much just mantain it themselves if they want to.

Don’t forget unity’s engineers are among the best you can get.

5

Thanks for the clarification. I just saw this: GitHub - Unity-Technologies/mono: Mono open source ECMA CLI, C# and .NET implementation.

6

Yeah Unity has it’s own version of mono. But it might lack certain main .net feature but definitely not lacking when making a game. :smile:

7

If they lack a main, they’ll make a main. They’re not going to trash their core business over this.