Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
Well, this is surprising isn't it? Microsoft are handing over the Mono Project to the Wine developers with a thank you note.
FYI - the owner of this site, gamingonlinux, was a mod on the !linux_gaming@lemmy.ml community until they were caught abusing their moderator powers. Then they deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it's stupid design that mod logs are public.
That's one of the things I love in lemmy. Moderation transparency.
I’m boosting this and the screenshots too, but just thought I’d point out for quick scrollers that it does not seem as dramatic as this comment initially lets you believe.
I mean it’s awkward, but just seems more like your usual social awkwardness/incompetence than malicious behavior as such.
I agree that the main interaction was mild, but if they were willing to go this far to try to hide this, then that shows how low the bar is for them to try to manipulate things to their favor and liking with the trust that was given them as a moderator.
Look at the screenshots few comments down. That was a shitty mod. They can have those back at reddit.
lemmy.ml doing .ml-things
Fuck that guy.
I really dislike that guy. I was interested in his website but lost interest because of him. I already forgot why I started disliking him. But this just adds to that.
You seem very hurt about that one interaction you had with him months ago. If you're gonna comment that under every gamingonlinux article you'll have a lot to do.
I'd rather have that than have moderators bringing their shitty reddit leftover mentalities and think they can throw tantrums anytime someone critiques their post title. I mean homie was a moderator, who quit the site entirely as his reaction to the same interaction you are criticizing homie here for his reaction after bringing up a relevant commentary about the individual from the post.
Edit: Plus!, how often does anyone on the internet ever actually follow up a real live relevant to the post anecdotal account AAAAAAND follow up with empirical evidence lol.
It has nothing to do with "being hurt". They showed the kind of scummy person they are.
They showed that if they were willing to go this far to try to hide this, then that shows how low the bar is for them to try to manipulate things to their favor and liking with the trust that was given them as a moderator.
I don't like the idea of that kind of person reaping the benefits of their site being linked to on the platform they tried to manipulate.
I don't like the idea of people not facing the consequences of these kinds of actions.
I think people should know who this person is, since they showed their true self and then tried to hide it.
Microsoft gives the Wine team infectious mononucleosis. Got it.
But seriously, Microsoft is nobody's friend and shouldn't be trusted.
In an organization as large as MS there have to be a few good guys. Just don't let the corporate leadership hear about it.
I know a lot of folk that work at MS or have worked there, they are all very good people. They are highly motivated professionals that are top in their field. MS is a rich company and they recruit the best they can. However those are not the people making any kind of decisions. And it's a cut throat company, if the budget gets cut, you are out on your ass. At least in most of the world, where strong employee protection isn't a thing.
Don't get me wrong, MS has a lot of bad apples just like any other company. Useless managers who say dumb shit and take praise for other peoples work. A leadership that doesn't care about anything except their bonuses and the bottom line. But at least as far as the engineers go, there's plenty of really good folk.
People also seem to forget how huge MS actually is. And a lot of the time the different branches within the company are as far away from each other as can be. Even within the same branch one can only talk to so many people.
From a Microsoft employee: with all the conspiracy theories people have about Microsoft secretly planning to control th world, the most surprising thing is them assuming MS are this organized to attemp it.
Edit: I'm not the employee, it was Scott Hanselman from MS who said it.
Lol noone is thinking they are taking over the world. There is no conspiracy. Everyone has been so fucking tired of the operating system monopoly theve had on PC's before they started ruining every fucking piece of technology they touch.
I'm just speaking from their history. Like when they embraced Java, built their own JVM, shipped it with Windows, and then forked the Java language by adding Windows-specific APIs to Microsoft Java and not adding the Java 1.2 features to Microsoft Java. You can't convince me their aim all along wasn't specifically to kill Java, and cross-platform technologies like it. The whole "Windows tax" thing is another good example. And "Open Core."
And, who knows. Maybe they're either nicer now or less competent at that kind of evil. But if so, that's a relatively new thing. Their history as a company is full of (not-so-)"secretly planning to control the world". And they have never really faced any consequences for their anti-trust violations. And if they didn't want people to hold grudges, maybe they should have thought of that before fucking everyone over as thoroughly as they possibly could.
I guess you could say Microsoft was perfecting the art of enshittification before it became such a pervasive thing. Plus, I largely blame Gates personally for the rise of the institution of proprietary software, which is also complete BS.
Mind you, I don't blame you for working for Microsoft or anything. No ethical consumption (or employment) under capitalism and all that. And it's not like I'm not doing evil things on a regular basis as an employee where I work.
I am no Microsoft fanboy, but I get the impression people are a bit overly skeptical here.
I think this is fairly obvious. They have no further use for it, they can either let it rot or they can do the tiniest bit of effort and get some positive PR. It might also just be as simple as an initiative from some employees.
Wasn't it open source all the time? The article spins it more like microsoft don't want to shepherd the project any more, another group takes over?
Isn't it just less work for m$ or what am I missing?
That’s my take too
Edit: Yup, Microsoft kindly abandoned their work to others.
TIL that Mono is a Microsoft project. I always thought it was an open source reverse engineered .NET
It was only a Microsoft project the moment they bought Xamarin.
Wasn’t Ximian behind it at some point?
It was at first, then they became a for profit organization, Xamarin, who was bought by Microsoft.
I can't help but think that Microsoft has decided to proceed in some way that will break compatibility, so they're done with Mono now.
I know it's skeptical, but I just have no faith in that company to act in good faith with anything.
As much as it is beloved, I don't think windows sees Linux / wine as any kind of substantial threat.
Very true because the relationship they have with laptop manufacturers will ensure windows domination
proceed in some way that will break compatibility
That's what new major versions are for.
I can’t help but think that Microsoft has decided to proceed in some way that will break compatibility, so they’re done with Mono now.
It's essentially right there in the article:
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're done with it, you guys can take the scraps. By the way, ours is better and folks should move to it.
Microsoft is cancer but then so much of tech is going that way. We shouldn't lose sight of small victories, this is a good result. The EU is enforcing more openness and transparency in the sector. These are the type of changes we need.
What's the twist? There must be some reason.
I guess it's simply the framing: It was a not very actively maintained open source project. So they've decided to turn it over to a new maintainer. Calling that 'donation' is a bit pushing it
What’s the twist? There must be some reason.
.NET runs natively on Linux since quite some time. Honestly, I don't get what Mono is even good for these days. Maybe reverse engineering old .NET versions.
Cost cutting.
They officially don't care about running .NET applications on Linux anymore. They never really did before but so few people fell for that trap Microsoft is finally ready to turn in the towel
Huh, you are very much mistaken. Since .NET they have official and vast support for running on Linux and MacOS. Before they didn't and hence Mono/Xamarin.
It's more they are focused on running ASP and CLI apps on Linux, there is no official MS GUI library/framework for Linux which is one big thing missing from modern .net, there are a couple of thrid party ones like Avalonia however.
Jeezus. Microsoft can't do anything without people talking crap about them 😂
It's almost like they have a terrible track history and hold the gold medal for antitrust and enshitification.
It’s almost like they have a terrible track history and hold the gold medal for antitrust and enshitification.
To be fair, there is a young up and comer in that space. They could challenge the enshittification GOAT.
If someone evades billions in taxes but one day donates 50 dollars it doesn't absolve their wrongdoings whatsoever. This is just an attempt at trying to improve their image.
It doesn't mean there is some evil plan either 😂
You'll find that developers in these companies tend not to care so much about politics either.
Like I used to sell apple gear. The sales people were political. When I went to a developer conference, the developers were absolutely upfront about everything and normal people
No corpos does something for the good of the people. It just so happen that this particular thing does.
Behind every move, there is a price tag attached to it.
By doing that, Microsoft is trying to get good PR.
People have experience.
Nobody forced them to be ruthless monsters and monopolize computers for 40 years.
Because they're crap. Pretty obvious right?
How does this help open source?
I'm not sure how the community has grown to be so toxic recently that it becomes risky to release a product as open source, and we're losing opportunities. This has huge benefits to projects like wine
Are you guys suggesting they should retract the offer and close source everything?
They have burned their good will and trust long ago. When someone untrustworthy suddenly does something nice, you look for hidden hooks and definitely dont just take them for their word. If they actually did something nice then good for them, maybe if they keep it up they could eventually clean their reputation a little.
As the great philosopher and poet, George Bush, said:
Fool me once can't get fooled again!
This made me look up the wikipedia page on Bushism and I must say it's beautiful! Thanks :)
It's embarrassing at times, much like it was almost two decades ago when Slashdot used to shit on "Micro$oft" for everything. Lemmy also has a tendency to be emotional to tech news rather than factual, so there's that too.
Pretty much every tech company is shit in some way, but it's not productive to call it out everywhere. This is a good thing.
What people don't realize, is that Miguel de Icaza actually started gnome and mono.
Xamarin got acquired by Microsoft.
I'm so tired of watching the community crap on every company which donates open source (I've been watching for 25 years at least now). Even Redhat which basically is a major factor to the survival of Linux is getting crapped on. Systemd developers, etc.
If people are genuinely interested in Linux growing, they need a positive community. Because developers like myself mostly stopped providing free code (as a hobbyist developer) because whilst finding help is difficult, it's not hard to find people willing to abuse you and your projects unfortunately
Even the VLC developers can't escape the abuse
Microsoft has had dotnet-core for awhile. If you are running production dotnet loads (eg a C# app), you’ve probably been using those Linux containers for awhile. This doesn’t surprise me; they usually aren’t interested in maintaining an open version of software they have more restrictive licenses for. Enterprises will continue to use dotnet-core and Microsoft will probably do something to shoot mono in the foot in a few years.
Actually everybody will use .NET and not Mono if possible, as it's officially supported and a successor.
The reason to use mono over dotnet is political. This is stirring up some really old shit; I expect a continuation of that shit now. Mono is currently MIT as is dotnet core. Who knows what direction each project will go now? MS has a history of fucking with licenses and Wine uses copyleft setups.
With open version you don't mean open source right? Because it's open source. MIT is also not a restricitve license. https://github.com/dotnet/core
Read the headline and thought "there's a catch..."
Finally got around to reading the post and Microsoft is very politely saying "we've completed stealing their shit now. Don't know why anyone would want it, use ours now. You can have it though."
Thanks I guess? I'm glad it's out of their hands now and with an open source group that cares and can make a difference.
Now give us DirectX on Linux
But Vulkan is better anyway
Even so, having more software natively supported will always be a good thing. Half the reason why people drag their feet on switching to Linux is because of the lack of support for their favorite software.
That's a good.way to burden a competitor with a huge project.
Beware of Microsoft bearing gifts...
They don't give a shit anymore. The business customers are paying for 365 and the gamers are paying for gamepass. Those are the money makers now. If you want you can run windows, but if you're still running windows apps (including 365) then Microsoft still gets paid.
That's extremely uncharacteristic. Are they trying to prepare for an antitrust probe?
It's not that uncharacteristic. Mono is a fully open source project they didn't create, didn't really work on, and one they can't extract any value from. So this is basically a gesture that doesn't cost them anything, but at the same time it doesn't do much except generate a headline.
So they forked, gave mono away and asked that everyone use their fork?
It seems like they're hoping to gain a significant chunk of the mono community directly into .net.
That could be good or bad I suppose.
Remember back in 2008 when people were losing their shit if someone created a mono app on Linux? Miguel remembers.
Plenty of good reasons existed for that wariness, and if they are doing this now it's because it benefits MS in some way. Maybe they just got sick of maintaining it and figured they'd buy some goodwill.
I typed that before reading the article then saw this:
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.
Here you go Wine devs, we're cleaning our our garage, and by the way, we would really like folks to continue to be hooked to the MS teat of .net instead. Please keep maintaining this for us. Aren't we great?
.Net sucks, compared to mono. The compiler is slower, filesize after optimization is still higher and the character set in cli is far more limited when I compile an app with .Net.
Are those the most important factors for a framework? Or in the top 5?
... and execution speed is faster. And they're both open source. I mean, good thing we have choices, right?
Source? I'd like to see some modern numbers about those compile times. Hasn't been my experience at all.
Unfortunately the license agreement for .Net forbids publishing any kind of benchmark results.
It's my personal experience. I would have to share my affected projects for a source, but I didn't release them yet.
Just try it by printing some special characters on the cli - like arrow symbols
Someone on that page commented:
"It was always open source. They just bought the company who created* and maintained, it, moved the devs over to their own fork and closed down the original, graciously allowing the wine team to maintain their own fork of the old code, as if they needed a permission, lol. It's a good PR move (also for Wine, mind you) but nothing else."
Extend, Embrace, Extinguish?
Discard, De-license, Delete
