Microsoft hands over Mono to the Wine project

Microsoft is handing over the Mono project to WineHQ, which came as a bit of a surprise announcement today.

We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono/Mono · GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.

Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork.
↫ Mono’s website

Wine make use of Mono, so this seems like a natural home for the project. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s.NET, and is available on a wide variety of platforms, but lately it’s been languishing a bit, with no major release since 2019, and only small patches since then. Microsoft gained stewardship over the Mono project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.