Hello, all, I guess most of you see the announcement of Xamarin 2.0 as good news. However, I cannot help but feel the opposite. Let me tell you why:
1. At the Xamarin 2.0 FAQ <http://xamarin.com/xamarin-2.0-faq> it says: Our new product brands are: Xamarin.iOS (replaces MonoTouch) Xamarin.Android (replaces Mono for Android) Xamarin Studio, our new IDE (replaces MonoDevelop) That is, the name "Mono" is now completely phased out of the Xamarin product line. At the Xamarin Studio page <http://xamarin.com/studio> , MonoDevelop, upon which the Studio is based, is not mentioned once! Are you ashamed of MonoDevelop after you've been offering it to customers for years? At the Xamarin main page <http://xamarin.com/> Mono is mentioned only once at the very bottom, under the "Community" section - is Mono no longer part of Xamarin itself? I think this is not the beginning but rather the end of a process that started with the renaming of MonoMac to Xamarin.Mac (and please don't tell me "MonoMac is our community-supported version" because I haven't heard about it since). Then was the renaming of YOUR MonoSpace conference to MonkeySpace and the explanation was really ridiculous - "bigger scope... open source .NET development in general" (Miguel de Icaza at that very same "Monkey"Space conference). What bigger scope? .NET runs only on Windows, be it desktop or phone, while Mono runs on tens of platforms, including Windows. Yes, I do understand it's about "the scope of the community" but how broader is that community since the only significant piece of .NET missing in Mono is WPF? Mono is the core of your company, both historically and at present, since all of your products are based on it. And you are removing its name from anywhere it's mentioned. I don't see this as justified even for marketing reasons because if people know about you, it's because of Mono. That is, "Mono" is your marketing message. If you do reply to this mail, I'd really like to hear something a little deeper that "The change of our product names does not mean we are abandoning Mono, we are going to support it just as before". We all know how this works out: the name is abandoned, time passes, many current users forget about it, new users do not learn it at all, and after a little more time the project itself is abandoned. This kind of tactics reminds me of a very specific company which leads me to: 2. "Microsoft Joins Xamarin Evolve 2013 as Sole Platinum Sponsor" <http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-joins-xamarin-evolve-2013-as-sole-platinum-sponsor/> - I believe Microsoft have proven time and time again that they are enemies of Mono in particular and of open source in general. I do not want to quote a large part of the web on that but let me say a few words just about Mono. Miguel, you may remember you said "Microsoft as a company are not open-source-friendly" yourself at FOSDEM at the beginning of 2011. You may also remember how you at the same conference you told the story how you showed your C# REPL to Microsoft just before PDC 2008 and once they saw that, they changed their program and rushed their C# REPL with the only intent of showing it before you did. The proof that they didn't have a working product back then (while you did) lies in the simple fact that now, 5 (five!) years later Microsoft still do not have a working version (Roslyn is still a CTP and nobody knows when it's going to be released). While at the same time your C# REPL has been constantly evolving up to the point that NRefactory is based upon it. You may also remember that just a few months later that same 2011 the whole Mono team was ousted when Novell was bought my Attachmate - and its patents sold to a consortium of technology companies led by Microsoft (CPTN Holdings). For last I'd like to return to MonoSpace and the fact that a little before the renaming in the organization were involved a number of Microsoft employees, such as Scott Hanselman, and I don't believe they have nothing to do with the erasure of "Mono". I've been a Mono user for years and I'd really like for it to continue to flourish. It's just that I don't see this happening if everything goes on like that. I hope there will be positive change, it's not nearly late for it. Regards, Dimitar Dobrev -- View this message in context: http://mono.1490590.n4.nabble.com/Xamarin-2-0-concern-tp4658722.html Sent from the Mono - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
