[krupan]

The discussion here reminds me so much of early C# days. It was being touted as open source and cross platform back then, and Microsoft even hired a top GNOME developer to port it to Linux and GNOME was going to be rewritten in C#. It was going to be amazing. Never quite panned out.

[kelnos]

I think you might have the history mixed up a bit. The Mono project started without Microsoft's involvement (and they were probably even annoyed by it at the time).

GNOME was betting on their own Vala language, which is still a thing, but never really gained much traction.

Eventually Microsoft bought Mono during their embrace of open source.

[pjmlp]

Microsoft never had anything to do with that with nice story full of butterflies.

The only UNIX Microsoft has ever supported during pre-Satya days, was Rotor for FreeBSD, nothing else.

Mono and DotGNU had nothing to do with Microsoft until Xamarin acquisition.

[WuxiFingerHold]

> Never quite panned out.

I don't know what you're talking about, honestly. Maybe you're many years behind the current state of affairs.

.NET (core) is a very real thing. A extremely successful and powerful multi platform framework.

[raydev]

> Microsoft even hired a top GNOME developer to port it to Linux and GNOME was going to be rewritten in C#

Do you have a source for the GNOME C# claim? I can't find one.

[caspper69]

Miguel was not a MS employee. He did parlay Xamarin into an acqui-hire though and is now a softie.

[pjmlp]

Miguel has long left Microsoft and nowadays focus on Apple ecosystem, and Godot.

He also voiced back on twitter his disapproval on how Xamarin.Forms became MAUI.

[caspper69]

Good to know. Been out of the loop on his career for a while.

[homarp]

do you remember who was the 'top GNOME developer'?

[IshKebab]

Probably talking about Miguel de Icaza. I think his history is wrong though. I don't recall any talk of rewriting GNOME in C# - they were all about their pet language Vala.

And Miguel started Mono way before Microsoft made C# cross-platform. At that point they were antagonists.

[tamlin]

Microsoft had a research version of the CLR called Rotor (2002) that predated Mono (2004). Rotor built for Windows, FreeBSD, and macOs, albeit with a not-very-open license.

When Mono came along, the internal position at Microsoft was surprisingly positive. There was a dev slide deck that went into Mono in some depth. And a telling slide that said it wasn't a threat because the performance wasn't competitive at the time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Languag...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)

[caspper69]

Rotor was BSD licensed, so I suppose if that’s your definition of a not very open license…

[tamlin]

Rotor had it's own license:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_...

I have various snapshots of the Rotor 1 and 2 sources around and they have the SSCLI license. There is a file that contains BSD licensed code (pal\rotor_pal.h).

[caspper69]

Thank you for the follow up. You know after I posted that my thought was am I mistaking their BSD release for a BSD license, and of course I was. The memory isn’t what it used to be.

[dcrazy]

Was it originally BSD-licensed, or did it start out as the MS Public Source License or whatever it was called?

We could go back and check on Codeplex… oh wait.

[caspper69]

As a sibling poster updated it was some bastardized shared source license that never caught on.

Thank goodness MS got over their allergy to open source licenses, as they seem to prefer MIT nowadays for their releases.

My apologies for misremembering the details and being snarky. Humble pie eaten and enjoyed. :)

[morningcoffee81]

miguel de icaza

[wahnfrieden]

He is deep into Swift/SwiftUI now

[switch007]

Wow never knew that. So glad it didn't happen