Mono for IBM i Project

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I get quite a few questions about this so I thought I should let people know what's up.

I was part of a group that in the summer of 2006 ported Mono to run on PASE on IBM i (aka AS/400 and i5/OS). PASE is a runtime environment which is really AIX so AIX programs can usually run without change under PASE and vice-versa. You can run PASE programs from "native i" and communicate back and forth without too much trouble.

Anyway, we mostly finished and could run .net programs just fine. There was still some work to do on function calls that had prevented us from getting some of the libraries to work (like the graphics ones) when the time for the project ran out. I continued tinkering with it for a few months but despite my interest in continuing (and my area's interest) I've had to move on to other projects.

Unfortunately the licenses under which Mono is developed were disagreeable to the local lawyers and so it has sat in limbo ever since. That also means I can't release the source that we worked on.

I've been contacted many times since then so there is still interest out there.

A couple people have asked me how much work it was to do the port. I spent probably 4 or 5 months of effort on it and I worked with a team of 4 interns who spent 3 months working on it. Of course some of that time was learning about Mono and .net in general and not actually working on the port itself. I don't know what the code is like in the current Mono release so I don't know if it would be more or less difficult now.

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