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

Article summary

Microsoft has donated the Mono Project to the Wine team, with the last major release of the Mono Project being in July 2019 and minor patch releases since then. The Mono Project is an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework, and Microsoft has been progressively moving workloads to a modern fork of the Mono runtime. The WineHQ organization will take over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.

Main themes

• Mono Project donation
• Microsoft and open source
• WineHQ and Mono
• NET Framework and Core
• Legacy software support
• Cross-platform development

What commenters say

• The donation of the Mono Project to WineHQ is seen as a way for Microsoft to offload the maintenance burden of a legacy project.
• Some commenters believe that the Mono Project has no reason to live anymore, as Microsoft has moved on to newer technologies like .NET Core.
• Others argue that Mono still has value for running older .NET applications on non-Windows platforms, and that WineHQ can benefit from taking over the project.
• There is disagreement over whether the Mono Project is being retired or just put on life support, with some pointing out that it has already been in maintenance mode for years.
• Some commenters think that WineHQ will primarily use the Mono Project for maintenance and supporting older .NET applications, rather than actively developing it further.
• The donation is seen as a token of goodwill from Microsoft to the open-source community, particularly WineHQ, which has historically used Mono for supporting .NET apps.