Mono’s demise bad news for open source

Just when the Mono Project was beginning to gain traction, along comes Sun Microsystems to take the wind from its sails. I can’t help but feel it’s a mixed blessing.

Mono gives Linux developers something they have never had before. It’s a full application development platform, based on a fast runtime engine and virtual machine. It offers advanced, modern features, including Just-in-Time compilation, the “sandbox” security model and automated memory management. It supports multiple programming languages and it isn’t tied to any one processor. Best of all, it’s fully open source.

Mono’s demise bad news for open source.