views:

864

answers:

4

If the Mono project is successful it will pave the way for commercial software on non-Windows platforms.

I am interested in the prospect of writing and selling commercial software for the Mono platform along the lines of our existing Smoke Vector Graphics (OCaml) and F# for Visualization (.NET) products. Are any commercial library developers already building upon Mono and, if so, are they turning a profit from it?

Also, will it be feasible to write the software in Microsoft's F# language or will Mono have trouble with ILX?

A: 

Linux people are notoriously thrifty, so I'd consider the ROI.

Do you really want to spend your resources to target a group that has less than 10% market adoption, and out of that 10%, only 1% would be interested in your product, and only %0.01 percent would pay for it?

FlySwat
We're already making as much money from books and consultancy around Linux as we are from Windows in total.
Jon Harrop
Well, no one uses mono because there's really not a whole lot of need yet. If there were a need more people would use it.
Joel
10% of the market... that's a lot of people, enough to make you a millionaire ;)
igorgue
If they were going for mass market appeal, I doubt they'd be writing toolkits for OCaml and F#
Jimmy
+4  A: 

The Mono project lists a number of successful commercial projects here, and I would particularly point out Unity as being one of the more notable ones.

supercheetah
+1  A: 

My figures speak against it, we developed Qide 10 years ago and got 4 or so buys. We got at least a few hundred time more on Windows. The state of tools on Linux can just be named bad. Agreed you have wonderful things there but if you use GPLd software you will drown in their license stuff. There does exist one debugger really and one C compiler it gdb and gcc, despite the efforts of Intel and if you come along into some less well known language you got nothing. Ever tried ProjectCenter (Objective C development environment)? , the debuggers are mostly clis and you have to type info reg to get info about registers. DDD works very funny, it's one tools that while scrolling did not get that right, you scroll up you have to scroll the mouse wheel down. It's also unbelievable slow to scroll it's just as if the BOFH wants to make a joke of you.

Well I could argue about the even sader state on IBM AIX. What you have to pay to IBM is way beyond any reason...

So maybe you're luckier than we are. But I'm mostly fed up with trying to earn money with "application" development on Linux. The best I can say is that Linux works well for setting up net infrastructure, there you got decent payments, but with programming tools, forget it.

Regards

Friedrich
If that was really all that happened, you should write it off as a failed business strategy - you clearly didn't identify your target market.
Mihai Limbășan
I did, So I encourage you to do better Mihai
Friedrich
Well Piotr, I wrote do it better and in fact I'm currently for some Mono stuff, but that does not change anything in the simple fact that the state of development tools very fragmented and in many languages not existant. Feel free to proove me wrong. So give me a usable IDE for Erlang, Ocaml, Haskell, or even for Mono itself on Linux....
Friedrich
Seems that I had to delete my old comment to be able to create a new one.Old comment:This answer hardly seems relevant. First of all, something that happened 10 years ago has no relation to what the industry looks right now. Secondly, Mono is not a GPL software.Update:You should probably read the question again. It's about feasibility of selling commercial software for Mono. It's not about Erlang, Ocaml or Haskell and it's not about Linux's readiness for mainstream adoption. About the IDE - have a good look at the latest version of MonoDevelop.
Piotr Zurek
If that is really that great. You can surely point me out to commercial Mono offers, I know but one that is from Unitiymedia. But I guess you have tons of other examples.
Friedrich
very cute downvotes, and interestingly now other answer to my last comment. Looks very trolling to me ;-(
Friedrich
+6  A: 

Mono is a perfectly valid platform for running commercial software as a lot of companies have already proven. Some of them you can see here but there is a lot of which you will never hear about as they are running Mono in embedded environments (Sandisk Salsa mp3 player). From the latest news, Electronic Arts is going to use Mono for Sims3. How is that for an argument?

One of the main points of Mono is minimizing the effort for developers coming from Windows to Linux. In most cases no additional effort is required to make the same software that you already have on Windows, run on Linux, MacOS and other platforms in Mono.

Just to clarify some things that other people answering your question conveniently forgot about. Most of Mono (recently even the compiler) is licensed under MIT/X11 license which allows you to pretty much deploy it in under and conditions you see fit. There is no GPL "cancer" that some people seem to be so afraid of.

Personally, I have been playing with F# and Gtk# in Mono and I loved the experience. More about it here. This was possible due to the fact that the F# team has made sure that F# can run on Mono and they provided a simple Linux installer in their release. This should also be a signal that Mono is regarded as serious alternative to .Net, even by Microsoft.

Piotr Zurek