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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/01/novell_releases_mono/

Novell releases Mono

.NET goes gold

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski@theregister.co.uk)

Posted in Applications, 1st July 2004 07:40 GMT

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Novell has released the first version of Mono, which brings Microsoft's .NET framework to non-Microsoft platforms. It's available pre-compiled for SuSE and Red Hat distributions of Linux, and for Mac OS X. It's almost exactly three years since it was announced [1] by Miguel de Icaza. Novell acquired Ximian last year.

Mono is a run-time and C# compiler, but the team has included just-in-time support an IDE, and intriguingly, both a Visual Basic runtime and a Java VM. For a quick list of what's different from Microsoft's own .NET, consult this list [2]. The biggest omissions in the initial release are lack of COM support - which may affect legacy applications - and no printing.

The project has been controversial since the start, and remains so. Today the debate is about patents: Microsoft has claims on many core aspects of .NET. (See MS patents .Everything [3]). But simply getting there and providing a level of compatibility is no small achievement. And keeping compatible is a problem Microsoft has with itself [4]. ®

Related stories

Mono and dotGNU: what's the point? [5]
Novell marries SuSE to Ximian desktop [6]
A different kind of Mono culture [7]
MS patents .Everything [8]
Borland thinks Mono for open source .NET challenge [9]
Anders Heljsberg on what's next for C# [10]
.Net may yet close the open source movement [11]
And then there were two open source .NET clones [12]
BETRAYAL! .NET clones and GNOME in the firing line [13]
Why it pays to embrace and extend .NET de Icaza [14]