First spotted over on Gaming on Linux Microsoft have just announced the donation of the Mono project to Wine HQ, the open source community around the popular Windows -> Linux compatibility layer WINE.
Details from the Mono Project homepage:
The Mono Project (mono/mono) (‘original mono’) has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.
The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024.
We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono · GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.
Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork.
We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us.
Thank you to all the Mono developers!
Key Links
You can learn more about Mono and its transition from Microsoft to Wine HQ in the video below.