Mono Arrives, Brings .Net to Linux
After years of work, Novell Inc. announced Wednesday the availability of Mono 1.0, an open-source development platform based on Microsoft Corp.'s .Net framework.
The brainchild of noted open-source leader and developer Miguel de Icaza and Novell vice president of development, Mono is designed to enable software developers to create .Net applications that will work on Linux, Windows, Solaris and other operating systems.
Mono includes a C# compiler, a .Net-compatible runtime and two stacks of APIs (application programming interfaces). The first stack is a Mono stack that takes advantage of Linux; the other is compatible with the Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1, which provides support for ASP.Net, ADO.Net and other components. Mono 1.0 also incorporates such key .Net-compliant components as a portable execution system that includes just-in-time and pre-compilation support.
The project's developers strive to avoid the problem of being tied too closely to a possibly changeable Microsoft standard by basing its.Net implementation on the ECMA International C# and the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) open standards.
While often seen primarily as a way to bring C# to Linux, Mono also supports VisualBasic, Python, Jscript and, via the open-source iKVM project, Java.
Mono is covered by several open-source licenses. The C# compiler is released under the terms of the GNU GPL. The runtime libraries are under the GNU Library GPL, while the class libraries are released under the terms of the liberal MIT X11 license.
