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Comment by solomatov | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, adoption of this great technology is limited by crippleware license. You have to pay even for just developing applications. Of course, you can use starter edition, but it's useless because of size limit.

The same story is repeated again and again. Tool vendors think more about profits than about growth and adoption. Sun limited usage of server side Java on Linux which allowed PHP to occupy linux server side niche. When it understood that it made a mistake, it was too late. I am afraid, we will be developing mobile applications in JS in several years' time.

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The license fees are extremely reasonable for anyone doing professional development. You'll recoup the cost in one or two days of saved work.

Where exactly do you expect them to get the funds to develop this technology if they don't charge a reasonable fee to use it?

The starter edition worked for a long while for me to get a good feel of it, and I had no problem putting down the $ since it's a great platform.

Problem is, with such high fees they have discouraged the adoption of all the students/starters/tester around the world.

Why corporation like microsoft are offering os, ides, tools and also devices free to develop to those categories of people? 'Cause if you make them learn maybe they will make/support the adoption of your platform in the professional field in which they will work.

This is why Xamarin fees are nonsense. It's ok to pay high fees in the professional field, but you must offer low fees for new entries. And not, indie costs (299*2/3) are not enough low, and the starter pack is just useless.

Partially agree. When I choose a technology for my project, I have to prove to my supervisor that technology is a good fit. In case of Mono.Touch, its usage leads to too many risks. What if Mono.Touch is bought by evil company like Oracle (see what happened to MySQL) or decides to abuse its user base by imposing crazy fees? What if the company fails, and who is going to maintain the solution in this case etc? In case of current license, the risks related to these questions are just too high.

Don't you work for JetBrains? Couldn't the same thing be said for your tools? I love them but they're not cheap.

The situation is very different here. The core IntelliJ is open source. There're plenty of open source alternatives. So if the license is changed, there're a plenty of options to migrate project to alternative IDEs.

In case of Xamarin, there's no such choice. Only Xamarin can compile C# to iOS, and if the license changes, the whole project implemented with the tool is locked in. The only option is to rewrite the whole project with alternative technology.

I think, LGPL open source core SDK + paid IDE + paid additional libraries would be a much better choice which mitigates the risk. But Xamarin for some reason decided to choose a different path.

> I am afraid, we will be developing mobile applications in JS in several years' time.

Yeah, in QtQuick! (unlike Xamarin, Digia lets you use all the development tools out of the gate with the paid-license-only ones really enterprise centric (like the Oracle dbms client) and the foss version is lgpl so you can use it in your apps no problem (as long as you don't modify).

Also, C++11 has async! http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/async

The only barrier to qtquick in mobile is that Apple won't let Qt include v8 for the same reasons Chrome can't. So you are stuck on qtquick1 on ios.

> Also, C++11 has async!

You may not have fully understood the C# async/await feature.

The C# compiler rewrites apparent linear code that awaits on a future (Task in .NET) so that all the code that comes after the await goes into a continuation of that future. It can even rewrite a loop with an await in it into a chain of continuations, all the while taking care of hairy details like propagating exceptions.

It's pretty ironic that Mono was a reaction to MSFT's licensing issues.

Now we'll need the Mono equivalent for the Xamarin iOS api's etc.

Mono-ception.

They are more concerned about making money like MSFT than making world a better place.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Xamarin staff have given the world so much; I'd say billion+ dollar industry was built on the back of their labor. About time Miguel et al profited.

I agree that it's nothing wrong in making money. All the work should be paid.

However, their license makes their technology a niche product, when it could have been the main way mobile applications are developed.

> could have been the main way mobile applications are developed

is this so bad? I see at a competitive advantage to use their platform.

I'd rather ship 1.0 and 2.0 quickly to learn from customers than focus on the one true way to build mobile applications.

> However, their license makes their technology a niche product

Does not seem very niche to me.

The price starts at $300 per person per platform per year, and that applies to you right now should you decide to build anything that involves more than a few kilobytes of code.

Nobody's going to pick up Xamarin for fun, for experimentation, for learning, for scratching a creative itch. You can't download it for your kids or recommend it to your students. They have no product for use outside of companies and that guarantees it will be and die a niche riding on companies not wanting to retrain their .NET developers for iOS and Android.

Earlier this month I got to choose between Xamarin and everything else, I have years of C# experience and I like their IDE for general c#-on-mac stuff.

I chose Haxe instead.

They tried the "make the world a better place too".

Actually Miguel started the Gnome project, wrote Gnumeric, sponsored Evolution, etc.

Even Mono was once to be used in Linux and Gnome.

They were forced off Gnome, by valid license concerns, FUD, zealots and not few indiffrence.

What are they to do? Roll over and die?

I have nothing against Miguel and Mono. I just wanted to say that a product which is going to win the market, should be really open source and really free. People would choose PhoneGap for multi-platform mobile development over Mono.Touch because it has a friendlier license and leads to less risks.

I hate their pricing too and I hope they make their products a little more accessible to the developer who is just starting out in mobile.

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