OStatic

People often think of open source as being purely a Linux and BSD thing. Perhaps they're aware of open source on OS X as well, but in general Windows is seen as hostile to open source. And at the heart of the hostility surely must be Microsoft's proprietary .NET framework, right? But no: the Mono Project provides a cross-platform, open source implementation of .NET. Version 2.0 was released this week, and it has matured into a serious development framework.

The Mono Project has reached a couple of milestones recently: the release of version 1.0 of the MonoDevelop IDE, and the release of Mono 1.9, the beta for Mono 2.0. (Mono releases do not track .NET releases exactly, so Mono 2.0 will include a mix of features from .NET 2.0 and later versions). This advances the ability of open source developers to use the .NET platform, but how much does that matter?