Rotor, Mono and .NET: Bridging the Gap on 3 Fronts - Academia,
Enthusiasts, and Business
In late 2001, with the approval of Microsoft's Common Language
Infrastructure specification by the ECMA, came a whole new possibility
for .NET. Not only were the underlying aspects of .NET fully
standardized, but one of its key languages, C#, was accepted as a
standard too! The promise of .NET became even more enormous! Third
parties could take this 523 page CLI specification and 498 page C#
specification and implement the inner workings of .NET on their own.
What the community saw nearly immediately was a dedicated interest to
have .NET working on other operating systems, namely several Linux
distributions. The goal of the Mono Project was to re-implement .NET
to its fullest so that Linux developers can finally be able to
interact with their Windows counterparts more easily. Further along,
Microsoft released a beta version (now final release) of the Rotor
Project. This was a "shared source" implementation of .NET for the
academic and enthusiast communities that runs on FreeBSD, Windows XP,
and even Mac OS X!