728
Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I guess it's simply the framing: It was a not very actively maintained open source project. So they've decided to turn it over to a new maintainer. Calling that 'donation' is a bit pushing it
Most of the time a company does something like this they would just let it die. It’s good that Microsoft have at least made the effort to hand it over to a team who’s willing to keep it going.
...Like MS-DOS getting open sourced. It's pretty much worthless unless you need to use some really old device.
It's certainly good, I'm not arguing that. My point is, if the wine team is interested, they can fork the unmaintained project, and work on that. Eventually, people will switch over to the active fork. What Microsoft is doing, is helping the process along, and making it easier. So it's good, and helpful - but not really a "donation" to winehq.
Actually, wine used to maintain a fork.
So it's like "gifting" someone a puppy.