- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
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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?
Extend, Embrace, Extinguish?
Discard, De-license, Delete
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.
.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?
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
… and execution speed is faster. And they’re both open source. I mean, good thing we have choices, right?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Interesting article. Gives me some light on what Microsoft wants with open source code.
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
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.
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.
Yup, what they needed from Xamarin was absorbed into .NET and now that have MAUI for cross platform stuff, it was either sunset mono or give it to someone else
Now if only they would add Linux support to MAUI.
Agreed. I feel like it would make the most sense to just have a generic QT target, but that’s a licensing nightmare. Otherwise they’ll probably target GTK 4, which would still draw ire from some of the linux community lol
Maybe they’ll add it to Mono.
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.
Now give us DirectX on Linux
But Vulkan is better anyway
For end users, sure. It’s specifically designed as a lower level interface that’s harder for developers to implement.
True, though for most game/graphics developers you’re never interfacing directly with the graphics API, you’ll let your chosen engine/library do the heavy lifting.
It does have the downsides of increasing the barrier to entry for custom/bespoke engines but those edge cases seem to be covered well by DXVK.
Windows users use DXVK to boost framerates, it was the solution for making Elden Ring playable it’s first month
I would say at that point the cost/reward is worth it
Right? Dude Vulkan has impressed me a bunch lately. I use it for Deadlock and it feels much smoother than the streamers I see using DirectX, which is crazy since Deadlock is super early alpha. More stuff needs to support Vulkan
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Yup, runs super smooth out of the box with Proton, and changing to Vulkan in the video settings
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.
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.
Jeezus. Microsoft can’t do anything without people talking crap about them 😂
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
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.
People have experience.
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 :)
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?
All I said was MS is crap. I stand behind my statement. Looks like their PR team is working overtime here.
Mate. I don’t even use Windows anymore lol
And I started a few open source projects and contributed to a lot of them.
This is why Linux still isn’t gaining market share because for 25 years I’ve been watching the community scare off developers and treat them like crap. It happens constantly.
You’re not giving anyone any incentive to assist
In all likelihood they donated this code because it doesn’t benefit them anymore or became a burden. The developers aren’t sitting there thinking “mmm, this is gonna make us so popular”.
Did you know the guy who stayed mono is actually the guy who started gnome? They got acquired by Microsoft.
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.
You’re not wrong, but if we want companies to keep doing things for good PR, we need to reward them for it.
They’re basically giant badly trained dogs that happen to control every aspect of our lives.
I agree actually. They’re not giving ANYONE incentive to donate to open source, and that mirrors my own experience where the community were asses to me too for my own project (which got lots of publicity including international print media, frontpage slashdot, etc. But after putting up with trolls telling me to do it a different way and calling it crap I dumped it. Fortunately a major distro had a similar idea at the same time and implemented. And thats a distro these same guys have also shat on honestly over the years.
People turned on Redhat too fairly quickly, and they donated a metric ton of code. And my experience in a lot of open source projects honestly is that on most of them, the community contributes next-to-nothing. Canonical too… SystemD? Constantly getting attacked.
it’s why I personally stopped creating my own projects.
If the community stopped using code from these companies they constantly crap on, I think they would be surprised just how little of linux is left (like Wayland is by a Redhat Developer, and Keith Packard from Xorg worked at HP).
And somehow, there is always some weird conspiracy too. Like even releasing Windows 1.0 source code would be something Microsoft does to try to trick linux users or whatever lol
Do you think they’re going to ask for this one back? 😂
Whatever it is, it benefits the community.
What price tag do you think is attached to this one?
Things can be beneficial to both parties… Not everything corporations do need to screw someone else 😂
Microsoft primary motivation was not to benefit the community, but to gain good PR in that case. It just so happen that this move also benefits the community as well.
And that’s my point. Sometimes, corpos’ decisions benefit the community, but this is only a side effect, not the intended purpose.
The guy who started mono also started gnome you realize.
More likely he influenced this decision
Nobody forced them to be ruthless monsters and monopolize computers for 40 years.
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.
In my experience, generally the most vocal contribute the least lol
These corpos are very vocal in arguing to maintain their low tax contributions so perhaps you’re right.
Again, you do realise Mono was started by the same guy who founded Gnome right?
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
“«Sorry Luke. I’m just doing my job. You gotta appreciate that.»
«Nah. Calling it your job don’t make it right, boss.»” —Cool Hand Luke (1967)Removed by mod
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.
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.
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.”
