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It looks like Microsoft hasn't reformed as some would like to think, but has moved its embrace, extend, extinguish policy to the mobile platform. In this article from techrights.org , we see a company (responsible for Mono) with strong MS connections take over an open source project and close it.
LAST WEEK we wrote about Xamarin's disturbing takeover of RoboVM [1, 2], which was a threat to Microsoft's monopoly and domination of APIs (especially on the desktop). Xamarin, for the uninitiated, creates proprietary software that strives to spread Microsoft's .NET to mobile (including Android) devices.
It has only been less than a week and now we learn from Abel Avram that "RoboVM Is No Longer Open Source".
"Following RoboVM's acquisition by Xamarin," explains Avram, "the company has raised the price of their offering and has closed the source code."
Discussion of a fork is in the works:
It has gotten so bad that RoboVM might be forked. To quote Avram, "some developers consider that closing down the source code has to do with Xamarin's acquisition. And some are discussing forking the project, perhaps starting with the sources v. 1.8 which will be pushed to GitHub this week, according to Zechner. It remains to see how successful they are in their endeavor considering that RoboVM is not a trivial piece of software."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 04 2015, @12:21AM
Except that GTK+ is used in Gnome3, which is absolute worst desktop environment available on Linux. It's a terrible toolkit to work with, and is so crappy that the low-resource LXDE has switched to Qt.
That's great that RH contributed to the kernel (but only 1/6 of it, so don't pretend like the majority of it is from RH) and is open-source and doesn't sell personal data and all, but it'd be nice if they didn't employ the arrogant Gnome developers and keep pushing the markedly inferior Gnome desktop. It isn't helping Linux adoption at all, in fact quite the opposite. Just look at how many people switched to Cinnamon and MATE and Xcfe when Gnome3 came out; Gnome has succeeded in fragmenting the Linux desktop even more than it already was.