Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Mono

Mono is an open-source implementation of the .NET platform. I haven't played with it but it looks like they've made quite a bit of progress. Mono is supported on several platforms: Linux, Solaris, Macintosh OS X, Windows and other flavors of Unix.

Mono is an open source project but was primarily developed by Ximian which is now part of Novell. As in indication of how overlapping commercial and open source development can get complicated, according to the Mono FAQ, code contributions to Mono require that the author grants Novell the right to relicense his/her contribution under other licensing terms — to avoid entanglement with GPL / LGPL versions of the code.

I know very little Spanish and thus didn't realize, as the FAQ reports, the name Mono was taken from the Spanish word for monkey. And perhaps Ximian was derived from Simian?

I guess if Linus Torvald's interest in penguins resulted in a mascot for Linux, Miguel de Icaza's affection for monkeys has done the same for Mono. That's supposed to be a monkey's profile in the Mono logo.

Note: Microsoft provides a shared-source .NET implementation known formally as the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure 2.0 Release (aka Rotor). You can download the SSCLI source from here. O'Reilly has also published a book on SSCLI — Shared Source CLI Essentials.
posted by Bob at 4/25/2006 10:00:00 PM  | | digg | del.icio.us | reddit