The Future of Mono and MonoTouch is Uncertain

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2010-04-17 10:29:27 UTC
Modified: 2010-04-17 10:29:27 UTC

Summary: Why programming with Mono (or with MonoTouch) is a risky thing to do, especially now that Novell is up for sale and Apple blocks .NET/Mono

THE Mono and Moonlight advocacy from a Microsoft MVP who is also a vice president of Novell carries on with announcements like this one. The difference between Microsoft and Novell is not quite so clear anymore.

A few days ago we found this post in Planet OpenSUSE . It's about running ASP.NET under SUSE. Is this Novell's vision?

Previously, I wrote an entry on setting up mojoPortal (ASP.NET web app) on SUSE Linux Enterprise with the Mono extension (link). Using the exact same steps that I described, written & tested against my Lenovo Thinkpad (x86), I can achieve the same result on the IBM System z10 BC!

As we've pointed out for over a week now, Apple is blocking Novell's MonoTouch [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and there is not much Novell can do except beg or negotiate. [via]

We are reaching out to Apple for clarification on their intention, and believe there is plenty of room for course-correction prior to the final release of the 4.0 SDK.

From Miguel de Icaza's blog:

We have just released MonoTouch 3.0.0 with support for iPhoneOS 4.0's new APIs. To try it out, you need to have Apple's iPhone 4.0 SDK installed otherwise MonoTouch 2.0 wont let you download the new toolkit (since it is Apple confidential at this point).

Novell carries on pretending that it is not being blocked by Apple. In the mean time, anyone who embraces MonoTouch may see his/her work going down the drain. As we pointed out last week when someone inquired, relying on Mono in general is a bad idea because Novell is up for sale and the future of Mono is therefore uncertain. Buy hey, with C# code there's always Microsoft's warm embrace to run to. That perhaps is part of the plan. ⬆

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The Future of Mono and MonoTouch is Uncertain

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