In August 2024, Microsoft transferred the Mono project, an open-source software platform for building cross-platform applications and an alternative to the .NET platform, to the Wine community and the WineHQ organization. WineHQ is known for developing an open implementation of the Win32 API.
As you may already know, Microsoft gained access to the Mono project after acquiring Xamarin in 2016. The Mono platform was intended to be used to develop tools for developing mobile applications in C# using .NET technologies. Three years later, the project stagnated, and since 2019, significant releases have ceased, although the project's developers have continued to publish regular corrective updates.
Since the Wine software includes Mono for running Windows-built .NET executables, its developers have created an in-development fork of Mono that was well-maintained and frequently updated over several years.
Following a review of this toolkit's development, Microsoft chose to transfer the primary Mono project to the Wine community, designating the Wine Mono repository as the primary one. The original Mono repository's code will be moved to an archived status. The pre-built binaries that were previously created will continue to be accessible for four years.
By shipping the original Mono to Wine, Microsoft will continue to maintain a more modern fork of Mono Runtime included in the open source .NET code base. The plan is to gradually migrate components of Microsoft projects that remain tied to Mono to this fork. Microsoft also said that it encourages users of applications that use Mono to migrate to the general .NET platform, which includes Mono Runtime.
A brief Mono history overview
The Mono platform was founded in 2001 by Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman, who founded Ximian to develop their projects. In 2003, Ximian was sold to Novell and the first release of Mono 1.0, released in 2004, was prepared by Novell.
In 2011, as a result of the restructuring carried out after Novell was purchased by Attachmate, all Mono project developers were laid off. In response, Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman founded a new company, Xamarin, which began developing and supporting Mono-related projects independently of the Attachmate holding company.
Two months later, Xamarin and Attachmate entered into an agreement under which Attachmate recognized Mono as an independent open source project and granted Xamarin the perpetual right to use all intellectual property and trademarks associated with the Mono project.
In February 2016, Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman sold their business to Microsoft, after which the Mono project changed its license from LGPLv2 to MIT and came under the management of the non-profit .NET Foundation, created by Microsoft. It also opened up the previously separately distributed proprietary extensions to Mono and provided commitments to ensure that Microsoft's patents are not enforced against anyone developing, using, selling, importing, or distributing Mono. Mono components were integrated into the first open source release of the .NET Core platform.
The official announcement is here.
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