Microsoft has donated Mono, the open source, cross-platform, implementation of the .NET framework, to WineHQ. The donation was made quietly, with the only real sign being a small paragraph on the project's GitHub page.

Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and BSD.

The Mono project is part of the .NET Foundation, and is a software platform designed to allow developers to create cross platform applications. It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime.

Mono was launched in 2001 and Microsoft acquired it when it acquired Xamarin in 2016. There hasn't been a lot of activity on Mono over recent years - the last major release was in 2019, with minor patch releases since then.

The announcement on GitHub said:

"We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono · GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years."

While the Mono Project has been handed over, Microsoft says it maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. On the Mono GitHub page, Microsoft principal software engineer Jeff Schwartz, engineering manager of the .NET runtime team, said that work is now complete, and Microsoft recommends that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork.

In practical terms, you'll still find parts of Mono in .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI). MAUI's documentation includes the statement that the environment is implemented by Mono, an implementation of the .NET runtime for Android, iOS, and macOS. Blazor WebAssembly also uses Mono for its .NET runtime in the browser.

In an acknowledgement of the historical importance of Mono, Schwartz said:

"We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us."

More Information

Mono On GitHub

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