The discussion here reminds me so much of early C# days. It was being touted as open source and cross platform back then, and Microsoft even hired a top GNOME developer to port it to Linux and GNOME was going to be rewritten in C#. It was going to be amazing. Never quite panned out.
I think you might have the history mixed up a bit. The Mono project started without Microsoft's involvement (and they were probably even annoyed by it at the time).
GNOME was betting on their own Vala language, which is still a thing, but never really gained much traction.
Eventually Microsoft bought Mono during their embrace of open source.
Probably talking about Miguel de Icaza. I think his history is wrong though. I don't recall any talk of rewriting GNOME in C# - they were all about their pet language Vala.
And Miguel started Mono way before Microsoft made C# cross-platform. At that point they were antagonists.
Microsoft had a research version of the CLR called Rotor (2002) that predated Mono (2004). Rotor built for Windows, FreeBSD, and macOs, albeit with a not-very-open license.
When Mono came along, the internal position at Microsoft was surprisingly positive. There was a dev slide deck that went into Mono in some depth. And a telling slide that said it wasn't a threat because the performance wasn't competitive at the time.
I have various snapshots of the Rotor 1 and 2 sources around and they have the SSCLI license. There is a file that contains BSD licensed code (pal\rotor_pal.h).
Thank you for the follow up. You know after I posted that my thought was am I mistaking their BSD release for a BSD license, and of course I was. The memory isn’t what it used to be.
