14 ms·

Mono Developers start their own company

325 points by jstedfast 15y ago

Pooter 15y ago
So, basically, Mono's dead.
equark 15y ago
Doesn't look like the Mono guys were able to keep the key IP. That's too bad. It's hard to see what Attachmate gains by keeping it.
- escoz 15y ago
  My guess is it simply takes a lot of time/money to get IP issues solved, which the mono guys don't have.. they would rather rebuild it than wait indefinitely for those things to be resolved.
- zbowling 15y ago
  Really sucks. Something interesting is that the contributor agreement wasn't a copyright assignment but that you licensed your code to Novell and that you granted them the right to relicense it under any license they wanted.
zbowling 15y ago
Former Mono contributor myself from 2006-2008. Crazy day. It won't die. To many companies are invested in it. I always wished it would spin off earlier. I wanted to meet up with Miguel when he was in SF a few days ago, but now I know why he was so busy.
sapper2 15y ago
MS should support them with some funding.
- jordan0day 15y ago
  I agree with this. While you could certainly make the argument that Mono undercuts Microsoft by expanding .NET beyond Windows, I think the amount of developer goodwill it generates towards .NET probably compensates for that.
  - yuhong 15y ago
    Not to mention that Mono can be used to push developers toward Windows and the official .NET Framework, and in fact has.
    - cageface 15y ago
      Which is exactly why some of us are reluctant to cheer Mono on, no matter how dedicated and talented the Mono team might be.
      - jbuzbee 15y ago
        Agreed - My feeling has always been that Microsoft would weakly support the "toy" effort on other platforms and then encourage/threaten people to deploy to a "real" platform when the time comes.
- mbreese 15y ago
  It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for them to sue.
  - bullseye 15y ago
    Microsoft applied the "Community Promise" to the ECMA C# and CLI standards a couple of years ago. http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
    - tytso 15y ago
      For C# and the core language, yes. But not anything higher on the .NET stack. Novell had some patents that was able to hold Microsoft at bay. But since Novell sold off their patent portfolio, who knows? Personally, I wouldn't touch Mono would a ten foot pole, but that's just me....
      - thedeuce 15y ago
        Well of course since you work for Google, I wouldn't expect any other answer ;p
  - azakai 15y ago
    > It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for them to sue. For exactly this reason, I don't expect to see this happen.
- equark 15y ago
  Giving the Mono guys $50 million seems like a no-brainer investment to me. This is particularly true since MonoTouch directly helps bring apps to WP7. It would also help their cloud efforts. The future is heterogeneous, and while Mono can already handle that there's too much FUD.
  - cabalamat 15y ago
    > MonoTouch directly helps bring apps to WP7 Particularly if it means there could be one platform on which to write apps for both WP7 and Android. I doubt Ballmer would go for it. He probably still thinks "Linux is a cancer" and a threat to be destroyed, whereas in fact the threat to MS is more from Apple. If I was running MS I'd use the disquiet Oracle has created in the Java world by pushing for .NET/C# to replace Java as the standard OS-neutral run-anywhere platform.
- darklajid 15y ago
  I don't know.. While I'd love to see some funding for these awesome guys, I don't think that Microsoft's money would be that great. Moving Mono development from a big corporation to a small startup might even help settle some of the FUD problems. Receiving money from MS probably wouldn't...
  - equark 15y ago
    True. Although funding or enterprise adoption from somebody like IBM would say a lot. Right now it is not clear whether Mono is a viable enterprise platform for customers that value cross-platform deployments. At least that's the perception I get.
c4urself 15y ago
Any one have any statistics on Mono or know companies that use it, always wondered about Mono usage. What are some use cases?
- jordan0day 15y ago
  Not sure on how up-to-date this is: http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono I know one prominent company using Mono is Medtronic, who use it for their iOS app, and have been featured prominently by Apple.
- m_myers 15y ago
  My first thought is to run ASP.NET on a Linux server. Also, some Gnome apps are written in C#: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Software_developed_with_Mono http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Software_develo...
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    Really? You gotta be pretty damn tight to deal with that nightmare I imagine. I'd be more inclined to guess it sees more use in shops that are .Net but want to use something like a memcached or redis server and want to write small utilities on that server in a language they know. Pure speculation though.
    - julianz 15y ago
      Fogbugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/ http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/) on Linux runs under Mono. We use it. It works well.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > to run ASP.NET on a Linux server I can understand using ASP.NET on Windows servers. There aren't that many better alternatives (there are a couple, but not that many and most of them would require some tweaking), but Linux, like any Unix-like, server has a whole lot of exquisitely refined web platforms that are superior to ASP.NET in each and every way. Unless you are already invested in ASP.NET. Linux would be the lesser of the two evils.
there 15y ago
his former company was called ximian, which was started to do commercial gnome development. this new company is called xamarin to do commercial mono development. those are some pretty confusing names.
- m_myers 15y ago
  From "simian" and "tamarin" in keeping with the monkey (mono) theme, presumably.
  - sh4na 15y ago
    yup, that's exactly it
senex 15y ago
Does anybody know how they'll be funded over the next few years?
- matthew-wegner 15y ago
  The article mentions angel funding to start.
- mdeicaza 15y ago
  We should break even from the proprietary products, plus the consulting and support services. That being said, we want to grow, we want to market, we want to expand, and for that we will be raising VC funds.
  - darklajid 15y ago
    Great to see you here. Any plans to have a 'Team' section for Xamarin? I'd love to know who jumped on board, tbh.
euroclydon 15y ago
Has something happened since Apple implemented the no interpreters rule? Didn't Apple outlaw MonoTouch?
- sh4na 15y ago
  that rule was reversed months ago
  - tzs 15y ago
    Also, while it was in effect it was not enforced against apps that used Mono.
    - guelo 15y ago
      Yea, it was all about trying to screw Adobe.
      - melling 15y ago
        Why specifically were they trying to screw Adobe?
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
        DrJokepu 15y ago
        That was around when Adobe was planning to ship Flash with an automatic Flash-to-iOS App exporter. Apple tried to (and managed to) stop that from happening.
        wmf 15y ago
        Flash Player for iOS sucks. But Apple doesn't want developers to forgo developing native apps while waiting for Flash to improve, so they just banned it. It's a clean break.
- bad_user 15y ago
selectnull 15y ago
It's awesome to see open source teams truly believe in what they do and stand up against, in lack of better name, "classic business model". First Jenkins CI, now Mono. I wish you all the best guys...
- jstedfast 15y ago
  thanks! We appreciate all the love!
bfrog 15y ago
I am confused by this. If attachmate let go of Mono developers clearly it felt the product has not been profitable and won't be any time soon. What investor with a sound mind would feel otherwise? Novell had already dumped millions in to it and look where they ended up.
- bad_user 15y ago
  Novell had already dumped millions in to it How do you know that?
  - bfrog 15y ago
    In terms of developer salary alone I have no doubt Novell has put millions of dollars in to Mono with no real obvious profitable products.
    - zbowling 15y ago
      Besides the contracts with Unity, several game developers on the PS3 and Wii, EA, and others. Besides the MonoTouch and MonoDroid projects. Besides the support to other products like iFolder and Linux desktop apps they released. Besides the various support contracts Novell received for Mono from various companies. Besides the embedded licenses Novell scored to license Mono for things that were incompatible with the GPL runtime.... Nope... no real profits.
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
- jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
  The profile of a successful product is very different at a startup than it is at a large or medium-sized company. This is an important reason why startups exist.
sktrdie 15y ago
startup + opensource = fun!
- patrickg 15y ago
  If you have enough money for the first days/weeks/months/years.
thepumpkin1979 15y ago
How many of the former Novell developers will work in Xamarin?
motters 15y ago
I guess this is a make or break moment for the Mono project. Who owns the copyright on Mono anyway - is it individual developers?
jimbobimbo 15y ago
THIS is the company Microsoft needs to fund. Not Skype or Nokia.
- cabalamat 15y ago
  Especially considering the amount it would cost would be peanuts compared to Skype.
- josephcooney 15y ago
  In an ideal world, yes. But from a strategic point of view monotouch/monodroid (or whatever their new equivalents will be called) don't really help MS, it just helps developers from the MS stack port their skills to other platforms. If developer division didn't have the 'strategy tax' of being part of MS they'd probably be trying to do this themselves (re-targeting their tools to support development on alternate platforms). So in a way MONO helps MS by helping MS customers that MS can't help directly themselves. If there was a corporate equivalent of the relationship status "it's complicated" that's what I'd be using to describe the relationship between MS and the MONO project, but the rub is I don't think MS will be funding Monotouch/monodroid stuff any time soon.
  - cwbrandsma 15y ago
    I thought Microsoft did help fund the project when it was part of Novel. In the end, having a healthy .net community is in Microsoft's best interest, even if there is not a direct set of sales involved.
    - josephcooney 15y ago
      I know they (MS) had an engineering agreement with the MONO folks while they were at Novell re:Silverlight, but I don't know of any instances where they've donated money. If you've got any links please share them. From the Moonlight FAQ: http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/moonlight_faq.html#j http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/moonlight_faq.html#j This collaboration between Microsoft and Novell is a formal engineering development program. Novell is bringing the .NET-based Silverlight framework to Mono, an open source framework for running .NET applications on multiple platforms including Linux. Microsoft is providing a version of the necessary codecs for Linux.
teyc 15y ago
You know, I was an early skeptic of Mono. After all, what use is a copycat technology stack? I'm later to admit how wrong I was. Suddenly mono was deploying into iOS, Android and places where the existing developer ecosystem couldn't have otherwise. A hearty congratulations and wish you all the best. You deserve it.
nathanielksmith 15y ago
I still fail to see the commercial/hobbyist/* appeal of C#/.NET/mono.
erikpukinskis 15y ago
For those who didn't catch it, the "International Mono Support" aside is a reference to Miguel's earlier (first?) company, "International Gnome Support", renamed to Helix Code, then Ximian, and eventually purchased by Novell. It's awesome to see Miguel running a scrappy startup again. I just read through an old interview with him and Nat from the old IGF days, and Miguel hasn't lost any of the hacker/entrepreneur spirit: http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=6967 http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=6967
Todd 15y ago
This is the best news I've heard all week. Huge congratulations to Miguel and the entire Mono team!

325 points by jstedfast 15y ago

So, basically, Mono's dead.

Doesn't look like the Mono guys were able to keep the key IP. That's too bad. It's hard to see what Attachmate gains by keeping it.

escoz 15y ago
My guess is it simply takes a lot of time/money to get IP issues solved, which the mono guys don't have.. they would rather rebuild it than wait indefinitely for those things to be resolved.
zbowling 15y ago
Really sucks. Something interesting is that the contributor agreement wasn't a copyright assignment but that you licensed your code to Novell and that you granted them the right to relicense it under any license they wanted.

zbowling 15y ago

Former Mono contributor myself from 2006-2008. Crazy day. It won't die. To many companies are invested in it. I always wished it would spin off earlier. I wanted to meet up with Miguel when he was in SF a few days ago, but now I know why he was so busy.

sapper2 15y ago

MS should support them with some funding.

jordan0day 15y ago
I agree with this. While you could certainly make the argument that Mono undercuts Microsoft by expanding .NET beyond Windows, I think the amount of developer goodwill it generates towards .NET probably compensates for that.
- yuhong 15y ago
  Not to mention that Mono can be used to push developers toward Windows and the official .NET Framework, and in fact has.
  - cageface 15y ago
    Which is exactly why some of us are reluctant to cheer Mono on, no matter how dedicated and talented the Mono team might be.
    - jbuzbee 15y ago
      Agreed - My feeling has always been that Microsoft would weakly support the "toy" effort on other platforms and then encourage/threaten people to deploy to a "real" platform when the time comes.
mbreese 15y ago
It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for them to sue.
- bullseye 15y ago
  Microsoft applied the "Community Promise" to the ECMA C# and CLI standards a couple of years ago. http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
  - tytso 15y ago
    For C# and the core language, yes. But not anything higher on the .NET stack. Novell had some patents that was able to hold Microsoft at bay. But since Novell sold off their patent portfolio, who knows? Personally, I wouldn't touch Mono would a ten foot pole, but that's just me....
    - thedeuce 15y ago
      Well of course since you work for Google, I wouldn't expect any other answer ;p
- azakai 15y ago
  > It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for them to sue. For exactly this reason, I don't expect to see this happen.
equark 15y ago
Giving the Mono guys $50 million seems like a no-brainer investment to me. This is particularly true since MonoTouch directly helps bring apps to WP7. It would also help their cloud efforts. The future is heterogeneous, and while Mono can already handle that there's too much FUD.
- cabalamat 15y ago
  > MonoTouch directly helps bring apps to WP7 Particularly if it means there could be one platform on which to write apps for both WP7 and Android. I doubt Ballmer would go for it. He probably still thinks "Linux is a cancer" and a threat to be destroyed, whereas in fact the threat to MS is more from Apple. If I was running MS I'd use the disquiet Oracle has created in the Java world by pushing for .NET/C# to replace Java as the standard OS-neutral run-anywhere platform.
darklajid 15y ago
I don't know.. While I'd love to see some funding for these awesome guys, I don't think that Microsoft's money would be that great. Moving Mono development from a big corporation to a small startup might even help settle some of the FUD problems. Receiving money from MS probably wouldn't...
- equark 15y ago
  True. Although funding or enterprise adoption from somebody like IBM would say a lot. Right now it is not clear whether Mono is a viable enterprise platform for customers that value cross-platform deployments. At least that's the perception I get.

c4urself 15y ago

Any one have any statistics on Mono or know companies that use it, always wondered about Mono usage. What are some use cases?

jordan0day 15y ago
Not sure on how up-to-date this is: http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono I know one prominent company using Mono is Medtronic, who use it for their iOS app, and have been featured prominently by Apple.
m_myers 15y ago
My first thought is to run ASP.NET on a Linux server. Also, some Gnome apps are written in C#: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Software_developed_with_Mono http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Software_develo...
- mattmanser 15y ago
  Really? You gotta be pretty damn tight to deal with that nightmare I imagine. I'd be more inclined to guess it sees more use in shops that are .Net but want to use something like a memcached or redis server and want to write small utilities on that server in a language they know. Pure speculation though.
  - julianz 15y ago
    Fogbugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/ http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/) on Linux runs under Mono. We use it. It works well.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > to run ASP.NET on a Linux server I can understand using ASP.NET on Windows servers. There aren't that many better alternatives (there are a couple, but not that many and most of them would require some tweaking), but Linux, like any Unix-like, server has a whole lot of exquisitely refined web platforms that are superior to ASP.NET in each and every way. Unless you are already invested in ASP.NET. Linux would be the lesser of the two evils.

there 15y ago

his former company was called ximian, which was started to do commercial gnome development. this new company is called xamarin to do commercial mono development. those are some pretty confusing names.

m_myers 15y ago
From "simian" and "tamarin" in keeping with the monkey (mono) theme, presumably.
- sh4na 15y ago
  yup, that's exactly it

senex 15y ago

Does anybody know how they'll be funded over the next few years?

matthew-wegner 15y ago
The article mentions angel funding to start.
mdeicaza 15y ago
We should break even from the proprietary products, plus the consulting and support services. That being said, we want to grow, we want to market, we want to expand, and for that we will be raising VC funds.
- darklajid 15y ago
  Great to see you here. Any plans to have a 'Team' section for Xamarin? I'd love to know who jumped on board, tbh.

euroclydon 15y ago

Has something happened since Apple implemented the no interpreters rule? Didn't Apple outlaw MonoTouch?

sh4na 15y ago
that rule was reversed months ago
- tzs 15y ago
  Also, while it was in effect it was not enforced against apps that used Mono.
  - guelo 15y ago
    Yea, it was all about trying to screw Adobe.
    - melling 15y ago
      Why specifically were they trying to screw Adobe?
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - DrJokepu 15y ago
        That was around when Adobe was planning to ship Flash with an automatic Flash-to-iOS App exporter. Apple tried to (and managed to) stop that from happening.
      - wmf 15y ago
        Flash Player for iOS sucks. But Apple doesn't want developers to forgo developing native apps while waiting for Flash to improve, so they just banned it. It's a clean break.
bad_user 15y ago

selectnull 15y ago

It's awesome to see open source teams truly believe in what they do and stand up against, in lack of better name, "classic business model". First Jenkins CI, now Mono. I wish you all the best guys...

jstedfast 15y ago
thanks! We appreciate all the love!

bfrog 15y ago

I am confused by this. If attachmate let go of Mono developers clearly it felt the product has not been profitable and won't be any time soon. What investor with a sound mind would feel otherwise? Novell had already dumped millions in to it and look where they ended up.

bad_user 15y ago
Novell had already dumped millions in to it How do you know that?
- bfrog 15y ago
  In terms of developer salary alone I have no doubt Novell has put millions of dollars in to Mono with no real obvious profitable products.
  - zbowling 15y ago
    Besides the contracts with Unity, several game developers on the PS3 and Wii, EA, and others. Besides the MonoTouch and MonoDroid projects. Besides the support to other products like iFolder and Linux desktop apps they released. Besides the various support contracts Novell received for Mono from various companies. Besides the embedded licenses Novell scored to license Mono for things that were incompatible with the GPL runtime.... Nope... no real profits.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
The profile of a successful product is very different at a startup than it is at a large or medium-sized company. This is an important reason why startups exist.

sktrdie 15y ago

startup + opensource = fun!

patrickg 15y ago
If you have enough money for the first days/weeks/months/years.

thepumpkin1979 15y ago

How many of the former Novell developers will work in Xamarin?

motters 15y ago

I guess this is a make or break moment for the Mono project. Who owns the copyright on Mono anyway - is it individual developers?

jimbobimbo 15y ago

THIS is the company Microsoft needs to fund. Not Skype or Nokia.

cabalamat 15y ago
Especially considering the amount it would cost would be peanuts compared to Skype.
josephcooney 15y ago
In an ideal world, yes. But from a strategic point of view monotouch/monodroid (or whatever their new equivalents will be called) don't really help MS, it just helps developers from the MS stack port their skills to other platforms. If developer division didn't have the 'strategy tax' of being part of MS they'd probably be trying to do this themselves (re-targeting their tools to support development on alternate platforms). So in a way MONO helps MS by helping MS customers that MS can't help directly themselves. If there was a corporate equivalent of the relationship status "it's complicated" that's what I'd be using to describe the relationship between MS and the MONO project, but the rub is I don't think MS will be funding Monotouch/monodroid stuff any time soon.
- cwbrandsma 15y ago
  I thought Microsoft did help fund the project when it was part of Novel. In the end, having a healthy .net community is in Microsoft's best interest, even if there is not a direct set of sales involved.
  - josephcooney 15y ago
    I know they (MS) had an engineering agreement with the MONO folks while they were at Novell re:Silverlight, but I don't know of any instances where they've donated money. If you've got any links please share them. From the Moonlight FAQ: http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/moonlight_faq.html#j http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/moonlight_faq.html#j This collaboration between Microsoft and Novell is a formal engineering development program. Novell is bringing the .NET-based Silverlight framework to Mono, an open source framework for running .NET applications on multiple platforms including Linux. Microsoft is providing a version of the necessary codecs for Linux.

teyc 15y ago

You know, I was an early skeptic of Mono. After all, what use is a copycat technology stack? I'm later to admit how wrong I was. Suddenly mono was deploying into iOS, Android and places where the existing developer ecosystem couldn't have otherwise. A hearty congratulations and wish you all the best. You deserve it.

nathanielksmith 15y ago

I still fail to see the commercial/hobbyist/* appeal of C#/.NET/mono.

erikpukinskis 15y ago

For those who didn't catch it, the "International Mono Support" aside is a reference to Miguel's earlier (first?) company, "International Gnome Support", renamed to Helix Code, then Ximian, and eventually purchased by Novell. It's awesome to see Miguel running a scrappy startup again. I just read through an old interview with him and Nat from the old IGF days, and Miguel hasn't lost any of the hacker/entrepreneur spirit: http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=6967 http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=6967

Todd 15y ago

This is the best news I've heard all week. Huge congratulations to Miguel and the entire Mono team!