Ah, you beat me to this! I saw this article as well... Microsoft is making the source available but apparently isn't accepting code from the community. Sounds like their intentions is to help Mono get better. Probably because it IS better
I'm pretty darn excited. I've been following Miguel de Icaza for a while (creator of mono, GNOME and some other stuff) From what I gather Mono team will eventually help the newly open source .NET patch things up to run smoothly on Linux. They have said that now that the open source code of .NET is available they will improve Mono thus implementing all the things that were either broken, poorly implemented, etc. I recently got a student license of Xamarin Studio (you can cross compile to iOS, Android, Mac, Linux etc) so I've been thinking of becoming an enthusiast (don't wanna go near the word evangelist yet). All in all, great news. Really great news. And it's under the MIT License no less!
Of course you are! I see some major benefits with Mono of course. Installing dotnet anything has been a complete pain in PlayOnLinux. I hope there is a day where Mono can handle all of the dotnet functionality with old games and newer games. It would make my guides a LOT easier.
Microsoft is playing nice right now because they realize they have to......right now. Give them 2 or 3 years. This will all be a distant memory. I really, REALLY hope I'm wrong, but Microsoft's historical pattern says I'm not.
I'm sure you are right. Hopefully Mono will get everything it can to make games/programs run better without Dot NET while they can.
While I can't say how MS will handle their business in the future; I think for once I feel comfortable with the new CEO (Satya Nadella). I think it takes guts to do what he did and it's a bit uncertain on what's the direction of the company, will they spread their software to OSX and Linux? Who knows. I would love to use Microsoft Office on Linux (they brought it to OSX and Android as far as I know). We'll see how it goes for MS. I don't think we have much to fear on .NET since it's under the MIT license and honestly it'd be really really hardcore to see them hunting people. Beyond that? Well, let time tell I guess.
