Attachmate lays off Mono employees | Hacker News Reader

Attachmate lays off Mono employees

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71 pointsthesethings32 comments

Mono contributor (circa 2005-2006) here. They didn't axe the entire team. Still going strong. Mono had a number of people working on different sides and only part of the team was let go as part of Attachmate restructuring of the SuSE group.

Sensationalism at its best is at work here. Attachmate/Novell laid off a lot of employees in the US today, and "internetnews.com" goes on to extrapolate that "Today Attachmate laid off an unknown number of U.S. based Novell developers that were working on the open source Mono project". Indeed, the number is unknown - it may as well be zero.

IRC confirms that the number is at least 1 (and after knowing that I extrapolate that there is some truth in that headline).

"unknown number of U.S. based Novell developers that were working on the open source Mono project." does not mean the entire team was laid off. Second, no source is cited and this is unconfirmed as of yet. I think people should calm down with the speculation until something official happens.

Why would anybody do that when a chance to disparage Mono is presented?

Puzzling indeed, we should look for the positive aspects in this situation.

For instance when Nokia chose WP7 and C# over MeeGo and Qt, which lead to layoffs, resignations and other unpleasant consequences, Miguel DeIcaza looked for the positive aspects and declared that Nokia is simplifying the mobile landscape. [1] Similarly, we could now say that Attachmate is simplifying the cross-platform toolkit landscape...

[1] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-14.html

Is it premonition or self-fulfilling prophecy that most open-source developers felt a little queasy about Mono?

I'm pretty sure your question is inapplicable.

Attachmate's layoff almost certainly has nothing to do with the open-source viability of Mono and more to do with the difficulty of monetizing it. MonoVS, MonoTouch, and MonoDroid are fantastic projects, but the commercial demand for each is relatively low. There's probably not as much money there as was once thought.

(disclaimer: I'm a former Mono contributor and occasional user. I have no knowledge of this situation - this is the first I heard of it.)

I'd say "premonition", but that word summons "supernatural" connotations to me. Really it's just common sense, with even a mediocre knowledge of history.

FUD, actually. I did not see giving up and using past tense terms to describe OpenOffice when Oracle bought Sun and things did not go the way the community wanted. The community simply routed around. What makes Mono different? How does this news mean anything for Mono at all aside from people not getting paid to work on it?

Does the anti-Mono crowd just lay in wait for a negative story to further disseminate FUD? I've used Mono a few times and I just do not understand the treatment of Miguel and the project. The only answer I have ever deduced is that Mono is rooted in a Microsoft technology and the anti-Mono crowd apparently hates Microsoft.

Well, perhaps I jumped the gun on declaring it dead, but my question stands. As far as I can tell, C# provides a lot of nice features. Despite that fact, it seems to be as MS-only as Objective-C is Apple-only. No technical reason for either, but it seems strong in the open-source culture.

I don't get that. You say that C# provides a lot of nice features. Mono offers a C# compiler.

ObjC is for Apple only, because - they more or less control the field and push it hard there - other implementations lack the ecosystem - other implementations are far behind

Mono gained quite a lot of traction (F-Spot, Banshee, Tomboy) on Linux, so far that it even allowed to 'backport' former Linux-only apps to Windows and OS X. You get the nice features C# provides, even if you are not on Windows. And you can rely on the same framework.

: Except when you don't: WPF is the biggest example, other areas might lag behind as well. But you _can_ write software for multiple systems _or_ focus on Mono (Gtk#, Mono.Posix/Mono.Unix) only to rapidly write software on Linux.

I don't think I expressed myself very well. I'm saying that despite the nice features of C# that Mono brings to the table, it doesn't appear to have seen wide adoption. That's all. I didn't realize Tomboy was written in C#; that's great. I understand what Mono is, and that's why I'm confused that there don't seem to more (or at least, more visible) projects using it.

You might check out http://www.mono-project.com/Software and http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono

A number of GNOME applications (including Banshee, Ubuntu's default music player) are written in C#.

I did not see giving up and using past tense terms to describe OpenOffice when Oracle bought Sun and things did not go the way the community wanted. The community simply routed around. What makes Mono different?

I think the difference is that OpenOffice is done. It is more or less complete and usable right now (if arguably far from ideal). The Mono Project still many missing pieces (like tools for finding memory leaks or documentation). Compared to OpenOffice's, Mono's situation rides much more how much people expect that it will be maintained, adopted and get "traction" in the future.

That said, I don't know enough to say if Mono is "dead" or not.

Edit: I think this is also a quality of development frameworks as opposed to end-user applications. This is why developers were rightly concerned about the future when Nokia changed its development plans.

You're comparing platforms and applications as if they were the same thing.

OpenOffice is a single application. No one is going to have any trouble using that code base.

The correct comparison is to Java. Oracle is currently suing Google over Sun's patents on Java. And people are fleeing Java in droves. And the language around Mono's licensing of patents is pretty transparently designed to give Microsoft the option of suing people building on Mono.

"And people are fleeing Java in droves. " -evidence needed.

I am an open source developer and I love the Mono project.

I really don't know what you are basing you assumption on that most open-source developers dislike Mono, I know plenty that think its great as I do. A lot of pretty cool stuff is happening in the .Net world these days and Mono makes them available to us Linux and OS X developers. The only arguments I have heard against the project has been based on FUD.

From an article back in 09 when Miguel joined Microsoft's Open Source Foundation:

"That’s just what I was saying Linux needed the other day: more Silverlight applications. In fact, I was discussing how promoting Silverlight development in no way whatsoever helps Microsoft lock-in, and quite the contrary actually encourages the spread of software freedom under every definition known to mankind. Because it is Microsoft that is internationally recognized for leverging its considerable power to promote user freedom and interoperability through its file formats and development technologies we absolutely need more of that being produced in the Linux world, which tends to use proprietary and obscured formats and languages"

I really wish I'd never bought MonoTouch, I think a refund should be available to us that bought it less than a year ago.

I think you might be jumping the gun here a little, nobody said any major changes will be happening to the Mono project, this article has not even been confirmed yet.

It's not just this. The lack of a clear plan/solution for going forward regarding the new Xcode/IB single IDE; the solution to keep using the previous version just isn't ideal. I've seen a few times in the past 6 months where major changes dropped and users were asking for really basic info/response on forums and got nothing. I'm just going to stick it out with obj-c.

they have already announced that they're working on xcode 4 integration, and just today one of the developers for MonoDevelop released a video showing that integration working.

Good to know, but poking around the monotouch website I don't see anything about this. I'd think this would be on the frontpage or the news section at the very least. Nothing about it in community either. Little things like this (not being able to find valuable info) really does kill motivation to work on this otherwise fun/interesting platform.

If you're still looking for the video: http://twitter.com/#!/migueldeicaza/status/65513868599902208

They already offer a free version that you can use to try out the platform before you commit to purchase it, so I don't see what giving refunds would solve.

Yeah that is a valid point. I understood there was a chance things might not work out because of several potential pitfalls. So buying it was my decision for sure, I accept that.

Unfortunately though the rest of my sentiment probably won't change and truthfully the video showing the 'integration' is just too much of a kludge for me to get past. I understand their are contraints outside the mono teams control, but I'm still not happy seeing that as the 'solution'. Maybe it's not the longterm solution, but as it stands right now, that's all I have to go on.

Monotouch is a commercial product used by commercial companies that are backing their business on this development tool. Given the up and down nature of MononTouch over the last year. Apple's 3.3.1 outlawing of MonoTouch and eventual repleal and now this I would like to see the source code available or at least some escrow type availability, So we can have some confidence that we won't be left high and dry.

Personally I really hope that the MS-Novell deal will not be renewed.

Why should it not be renewed? I ask because, frankly, I am skeptical that you have the technical or legal backing to have an informed enough opinion to legitimately hold such a hope--and there's a surprising amount of FUD (no small amount perpetuated by Groklaw) about it.

http://mono-project.com/Compatibility shows Mono is as good as MS .Net

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