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Comment by johncolanduoni | Hacker News Reader

Xamarin's .NET mobile/mac offerings are closed source. Mono itself fills the role of the OpenJDK does for Java, but it alone is not suitable for running on mobile. Also, Mono is licensed under the LGPL and Xamarin's interpretation of that license precludes using the runtime in a closed-source program without a alternative license from them (which they provide with their paid plans).

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> Also, Mono is licensed under the LGPL and Xamarin's interpretation of that license precludes using the runtime in a closed-source program without a alternative license from them

Citation? I've never heard anyone interpret the GPL and LGPL as the same.

Embedding mono is different than using mono. https://xamarin.com/licensing

Sorry, I meant on mobile (like RoboVM). There is no way to comply with the LGPL on iOS.

Apple has a conflict with the LGPL in iOS apps, so Xamarin offers a commercial license. I'm not sure why this restriction would apply on other platforms though.

It's not a conflict with the LPGL, it's technical. Apple does not allow iOS apps to link to any shared libraries, they must be statically linked. Apple does not care how you license your libraries, only that you have the permission to do so, just like any other licensed content like photos or music.

It's also because Apple would be considered a distributor of the final application, thus according to the rules of the GPL, they'd be forced to provide the source code for any app that used GPL code.

Since they don't have access to the source code, they can't fulfill the legal obligation outlined in the GPL license.

>Also, Mono is licensed under the LGPL

From what I understand lot of code is GPLv2 as well, which would make the project as a whole GPLv2 licensed.

The project as a whole is not GPLv2.

From http://www.mono-project.com/docs/faq/licensing/

The C# compiler is dual-licensed under the MIT/X11 license and the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The tools are released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The runtime libraries are under the GNU Library GPL 2.0 (LGPL 2.0).

The class libraries are released under the terms of the MIT X11 license.

I should have specified that I was talking about the compiler toolchain.

When distributed 'as a whole' it is distributed under the terms of GPLv2.

The runtime libraries (LGPL) and class libraries are indeed not under GPLv2 .

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