Miguel De Icaza Forms New Mono Company: Xamarin 286
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."
Re:The cross-platform .NET? (Score:2, Informative)
it is compiled bytecode designed to run in a virtual machine, it does automatic garbage collection, and it appears to be the premier platform for MS development.
He's a troll. At most he can complain about you using byte code, MS calls it CIL Common intermediate language. They have their name for their VM too. But that's like saying "I'm not riding a vehicle, I'm riding a car".
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
Those that are missing currently (almost entirely limited to entity framework and workflow) have open source alternatives already available (EG NHibernate for EF).
In terms of release cycles it varies fairly wildly. Mono actually was at release for several parts of Framework 4 before Microsoft had their version out of the door, Microsoft tend to be fairly verbose with the roadmap and also put out a great deal of CTP’s targeting small sections of functionality which allows downstream projects to stay on top of what’s coming,
System.Reflection.Emit not in XNA (Score:5, Informative)
And like you noted, .NET apps or games can be written in many different languages. He seems to like Python
I was under the impression that IronPython and other DLR languages required System.Reflection.Emit, which was not present in the subset of the .NET Framework supported by Xbox 360 [mindcontrol.org] and Windows Phone 7 last time I checked.
All the languages can also use the huge library of code and API's.
The libraries also have to be written in pure .NET code, unlike in Python where it's common to package a C++ library as a module.
Rewriting code legalities (Score:5, Informative)
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.