Miguel de Icaza Starts New Company To Drive Mono

Two weeks back I broke the news that Attachmate was laying off all of the Mono developers following their recent acquisition of Novell and SUSE. Today this news has been confirmed by the Mono creator himself, Miguel de Icaza, in announcing the formation of a new company to further drive Mono into the new future.

Miguel de Icaza has announced the Xamarin company via a blog posting. Xamarin isn't to be confused with Ximian, which was the company started a decade ago to launch Mono and was subsequently acquired by Novell.

Xamarin is focusing on Mono-based products to provide .NET offerings for iOS and Android and will continue to maintain the open-source Mono and Moonlight components.

Miguel claims that the Mono developers had been trying to part ways with Novell since last year. "We have been trying to spin Mono off from Novell for more than a year now. Everyone agreed that Mono would have a brighter future as an independent company, so a plan was prepared last year. To make a long story short, the plan to spin off was not executed. Instead on Monday May 2nd, the Canadian and American teams were laid off; Europe, Brazil and Japan followed a few days later. These layoffs included all the MonoTouch and MonoDroid engineers and other key Mono developers. Although Attachmate allowed us to go home that day, we opted to provide technical support to our users until our last day at Novell, which was Friday last week."