"Its mono's fault" was told to me by one of the founders of Xamarin, in person, not by Unity. Perhaps they did offer Unity a license to their newer stuff, but at completely unacceptable terms. Xamarin's concern was that Unity would be a direct competitor with their own cross platform product.

I don't consider this to be anyone's fault, my point is that post-MS acquisition, it is easier to get access to the newest mono runtimes/compilers, which is why we are seeing them appear in Unity and in Godot.

>MS began to release their own .NET implementation under the kinds of license terms that Unity wanted years ago, but Unity didn't budge

That one wouldn't have targeted all of their platforms, right?

Perpetual arbitrary changing license fees are something everyone wants to avoid.

The fees went away, they started moving.

Its more complicated than that, but ultimately they won: the people demanding license fees got flipped off and they got what they wanted for free.

...so, I know a lot of people have been angry about this, but by every metric what they did was a total business success.

If you want the guys from Unity to act differently, you have to actually tangibly affect them (eg. pick a different engine), not just complain.

I sort of feel the same way, but they've just copied the Adobe and Autodesk licensing model, and its hard to blame them considering how well that has worked out for those other companies.