2003-06-11 12:00:00

SourceGear / Ximian Deal

We're announcing a deal with Ximian today.  We need Unix clients for SourceGear Vault, but alas, C# has no real cross-platform story.  So we've agreed to give Ximian a bag of money and they've agreed to hack Mono and make it speak .NET XML Web Services to ASP.NET.  Vault users will be able to run our command-line client on Linux, speaking to the Vault server, which will continue to be Windows-only.

(Note that we are punting the cross-platform GUI issues for now.  The Vault GUI client uses Windows Forms.  We'll tackle non-Windows GUI clients after we get the basic stuff working well.)

It's easy to feel good about this kind of deal, and not just because it's an honor to work with Miguel de Icaza.  Everybody gets something.  Vault users get more flexibility.  Ximian gets revenue.  All Mono users get interop with .NET XML Web Services.  The world is a [slightly] better place.