Microsoft hands over Mono to the Wine project

Microsoft is handing over the Mono project to WineHQ, which came as a bit of a surprise announcement today.

We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream atwine-mono/Mono GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existingmono/monoand other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.

Microsoft maintains a modern fork ofMono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repoand 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.NETwhich includes work from this fork.

Mono's website

Wine make use of Mono, so this seems like a natural home for the project. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET, and is available on a wide variety of platforms, but lately it's been languishing a bit, with no major release since 2019, and only small patches since then. Microsoft gained stewardship over the Mono project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.