4 ms·
Given that Xamarin bought RoboVM last year and that the project went closed source and raised prices just after that, it's fair to assume that RoboVM is dead.
by bad_user 11y ago
Given that Xamarin bought RoboVM last year and that the project went closed source and raised prices just after that, it's fair to assume that RoboVM is dead.
Also, I'm personally not happy about this. I think people on HN should know better. Besides a couple of black swans being the exceptions that confirm the rule, acquisitions is how projects die. This is because acquisitions are either defensive or acquihires. And even when done out of a genuine desire for progress, big companies end up choking these acquisitions to death, after all they weren't capable of such progress in-house, with the project members moving on after one or two years when their contract expires.
But hey, people were excited about Nokia as well.
- moonchrome 11y agoThing is Microsoft is already developing a lot of the stuff that makes Xamarin tick in the open source under liberal licenses - a lot of the legacy Mono tech already got replaced by CoreCLR equivalents, some are in the process or will be in the future. Eg. stuff like LLILC - IL -> LLVM static compiler will make the AoT for iOS story work instead of using mono AoT - but that project is not usable right now. Binding APIs are some work but not impossible for OSS community to replicate if the CoreCLR and friends provided a portable platform with liberal licensing - so even if Xamarin disappeared it could be replicated - but I see no reason for them to shut it down. And the third part of Xamarin is tooling which they can roll up into their own product offering. Basically acquihire is a good scenario in this case because Microsoft is already moving towards these areas, Xamarin brings in talent and a bridge with working tech to provide transition.
- pori 11y agoTrue, there are projects that die, Parse is perhaps the biggest example thus far. But seeing as how Microsoft is interested in expanding it's reach in OSS, I don't see a problem. This will likely be bundled with VS (which will be pretty cool!) and possibly even open sourced itself.
- shrewduser 11y agoandroid youtube and maps were all acquisitions. i think it's confirmation bias you don't really think of all the many successful acquisitions only the bad ones stand out.
- hngiszmo 11y agothose were aquisitions by Google. Now a list of Microsoft:
- slg 11y agoThere are some success stories even just limiting it to enterprise software. PowerPoint, Visio, and many products in the Dynamics family started out as acquisitions.
- TheLogothete 11y agoNot to mention SQL Server.
- pianoben 11y agoThe Acompli (now Outlook Mobile) acquisition has gone quite nicely so far (source: am on said team). That's just one recent example; there are quite a few MS products that came on board via acquisition.
- jurip 11y agoThe HockeyApp acquisition hasn't caused any pain so far.
- JupiterMoon 11y agoOnenote
- scholia 11y agoNot bought in, I think.... "OneNote started as an email exchange between myself and Steven Sinofsky, the Senior VP for Office, Nov 27, 2000." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chris_pratley/archive/2004/01/30/onenote-genesis.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chris_pratley/archive/2004/01/30/one...
- vsl 11y agoFWIW, in 2014, Microsoft bought HockeyApp. It's still actively developed and new features are being added. I expected it to die soon then, but apparently not all acquisitions, by MS in particular, end badly.