I think it is relevant to Unity in general.
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Unity seems firmly down the IL2CPP route but I wish this would have happened ages ago when first rumored. Especially since Microsoft seemed to be a pretty decent partner with Unity, I’m sure they would offer better terms on a mono upgrade.
Here’s hoping this is a long term positive for Unity and a resolution to the licensing issue. Please dear lord let this be the death of the antiquated gc. But yeah, maybe it’s too late given IL2CPP.
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Possible outcomes:
- Visual Studio Community Edition with full support for iOS and Android without Xamarin
- Xamarin Studio Community Edition will full support for iOS and Android
- Mono runtime moves to liberal, non L/GPL license (i.e. BSD, MIT)
- Visual Studio Mac version
So it finally happened. Next up, Unity?
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That’s my prediction.
My guess is that Xamarin will become free with Visual Studio. Microsoft already put a lot of eggs in that basket with all of the new mobile development and debugging features that you can optionally install with Visual Studio 2015 (including Community Editing since it is just Pro with difference licensing).
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I feel like we’re slowly progressing towards a cross-platform development suite. They have already started down this route by developing Visual Studio Code (my assumption being that it’s intended to replace VS’s internal editor) and now they’ve acquired a cross-platform compiler for .NET.
About the only thing left for them now is to acquire a cross-platform game engine. 
Beef-up Monogame?
Monogame is nowhere near the same. Microsoft abandoned XNA for a reason after all.
Monogame is a cross platform game engine. I thought with all the software engineers at Xamarin that are familiar with Monogame, and are now Microsofties, perhaps someone might say, “Hey lets branch Monogame and add this this and this. And make our whole eco-system that much sweeter.” Just Hypetheticalizing.
I’ll still hoping that Microsoft ports Silverlight to WebAssembly.
That would make me very happy.
Maybe they’ll buy Unity just for the IL2CPP tech! Got my fingers crossed.
That makes as little sense as following sentence: I’ll still hoping that Adobe ports Flash to WebAssembly. Face it, Silverlight is dead, even deader than Flash is.
Also, it’s very bad news for the open source community as a whole, especially people using Mono on Linux as M$ will either stop updating it (as they did with Skype once acquired - Linux version is nowhere near the functionality of Windows one) or straight up remove it from repos, close it down and sue anybody who tries to fork it and develop it further. They’ll lose, obviously, because LGPL and such, but they’ll try.
Only for those who used Mono. Those who didn’t will get to rub it in.
I don’t agree with this. Microsoft has moved towards a very open source centric mindset. Just about everything they are releasing for devs is open source now. Want the .net source code? Download it, MVC source code? Yep. New C# roslyn compiler? Sure why not.
They’ve got a ways to go still, but they’re changing their corporate identity and embracing open source.
They are also all about making it easy for devs to get into their technology. They have free versions of just about everything because they know that getting devs into their tech gets businesses into their tech and that’s where they make their money.
23 pages of open source projects.
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Same here, but that it doesn’t happen. I can’t see that the end result would be good for anyone. We don’t need more companies being gobbled up by big corporations, we need less of that. And yeah, Silverlight is pretty dead.
–Eric
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Yeah, it’s nice that Unity’s agenda is literally “make games work on everything”.
If it got purchased by a platform holder I’m sure that would tend towards “make games work on everything… but mostly our stuff”.
It’s possible there would be good intentions…at the beginning. It’s naive to think those would stick for long though, reality being what it is.
–Eric
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I’ll believe this when I can download full sources of Windows (kernel+userland) and/or sources of Microsoft Office released under LGPL.
Well there’s such a thing as solving today’s problems, today. IL2CPP is needed for WebGL, needed for performance and also allows Unity to perform specific optimisations relevant to Unity. So IL2CPP is a very good as a technology in general.