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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team (www.mono-project.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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The Mono Project (mono/mono) (‘original mono’) has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.

The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024.

We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono · GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.

Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork.

We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us.

Thank you to all the Mono developers!

Explanation of the differences between all the versions of mono from a Hacker News comment

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[-] THEWIZARD@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Good it does sound like a trategic move possibly though in a let's do what steamdeck's and steam in general's proton does for Linux and the Steam app if Microsoft can make people promote their software comparitively in some way it helps the cause long term goal wise I suppose.

[-] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 20 points 2 weeks ago

I always thought of Mono being synonymous to dotNET . And I was not aware that Mono started that early, in 2001. Why does the WINE team takeover Mono, if its not Windows specific?

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 32 points 2 weeks ago

I think the WINE project was maintaining a fork of Mono that was used to support running certain Windows applications:

https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono

So in addition to translating traditional WIN32 system calls, WINE also supports .NET applications, which a number of Windows programs require.

[-] gencha@lemm.ee 6 points 2 weeks ago

To add to that for clarity: With the original Mono, you could run a regular Windows .net application on non-Windows without any additional work (with limitations, as native Windows API calls were unsupported). With the modern dotnet, you can compile new applications from source that will run anywhere