Xamarin Gets All IP Rights for Mono and Related Products

Posted by Abel Avram on Jul 18, 2011

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Mono is back where it started. Miguel de Icaza and his developers have all legal rights to continue developing Mono and all related products due to an agreement with SUSE, now part of The Attachmate Group.

The reason why Xamarin, the company that has continued developing Mono after Novell was bought by The Attachmate Group, announced their interest in hiring consultants a week ago became clear today when SUSE, a former division of Novell, and Xamarin announced an agreement granting Xamarin a “broad, perpetual license to all intellectual property covering Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono Tools for Visual Studio.” In exchange, Xamarin will “provide technical support to SUSE customers using Mono-based products.” One important aspect of the agreement is that Xamarin is given “stewardship of the Mono open source community project.”

Both parties have something to gain from this agreement: SUSE will fulfill their support obligations towards present and future customers using Mono products, while Xamarin gets all the IP rights needed to develop Mono and related tools without worrying for a legal suit.

Miguel de Icaza has announced the Xamarin Store from where developers can buy MonoTouch for iOS and Mono for Android. Also, Xamarin will take over “MonoDevelop and the other Mono-centric in the Mono Organization at GitHub.” A new roadmap is drawn for MonoTouch and the Mono for Android. On the immediate term, priority are major bugs/issues reported by customers, while for short term Xamarin intends to incorporate some of the code developed for the last 2-3 months back into MonoTouch and Mono for Android. Jerry Stedfast, a Mono developer, added that they already started merging with the original code:

We've switched to using the original MonoTouch and Mono-for-Android sources, but we'll be merging some of the things we did better in xtouch/xandroid into MonoTouch and Mono-for-Android respectively (for MonoTouch 5.0 and Mono-for-Android 2.0).

On medium and long term, Xamarin plans among others iOS 5 support, asynchronous programming with C#, Mono GC for iPhone, C++ interoperability, and cross platform API for unified code across all major mobile OSes: iOS, Android and WP 7.

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   Great News

   by gaurav saxena

   I am happy to know that both the companies are working together for the development of mono platform.

   Reply

2. Back to top

   Great

   by 陈 国辉

   Thank you! thanks the mono !

   Reply