Microsoft Donates Mono To WineHQ

Microsoft donated Mono to WineHQ, and the handover was announced quietly on the project’s GitHub page. The note says WineHQ will take over as steward of Mono upstream, while existing source code stays available and binaries remain available for up to four years.

Microsoft says it still maintains a modern fork of the Mono runtime in dotnet/runtime and has been moving workloads to that fork. Jeff Schwartz says that work is now complete, and Microsoft recommends that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET. The page also notes that Mono still appears in .NET MAUI and Blazor WebAssembly, and it quotes Microsoft’s view of Mono as the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems.

Reading notes

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• Mono is an open source, cross-platform implementation of the .NET framework.
• Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on POSIX-compliant systems such as Linux, macOS, and BSD.
• Mono is part of the .NET Foundation and is based on ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime.
• Mono was launched in 2001, and Microsoft acquired it when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.
• The article says there has not been much activity on Mono in recent years, with the last major release in 2019 and minor patch releases since then.
• WineHQ will take over as steward of the Mono Project upstream.
• Existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although some may be archived.
• Binaries will remain available for up to four years.
• Microsoft says it maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in dotnet/runtime and has been moving workloads to that fork.
• Microsoft recommends that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET.
• The page says parts of Mono are still used in .NET MAUI and Blazor WebAssembly.
• Microsoft describes Mono as a trailblazer for cross-platform .NET across many operating systems.