Mono is dead, long live Mono… Hello Xamarin, Mono’s new home…

Miguel de Icaza - Announcing Xamarin

“Today we start Xamarin, our new company focused on Mono-based products.

These are some of the things that we will be doing at Xamarin:

• Build a new commercial .NET offering for iOS
• Build a new commercial .NET offering for Android
• Continue to contribute, maintain and develop the open source Mono and Moonlight components.
• Explore the Moonlight opportunities in the mobile space and the Mac appstore.

We believe strongly in splitting the presentation layer from the business logic in your application and supporting both your backend needs with C# on the server, the client or mobile devices and giving you the tools to use .NET languages in every desktop and mobile client.

Development started early this morning, we will first deliver the iPhone stack, followed by the Android stack, and then the Moonlight ports to both platforms.

…

Fighting for Your Right to Party

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.

We were clearly bummed out by this development, and had no desire to quit, especially with all the great progress in this last year. So, with a heavy dose of motivation from my music teacher, we hatched a plan.

Now, two weeks later, we have a plan in place, which includes both angel funding for keeping the team together, as well as a couple of engineering contracts that will help us stay together as a team while we ship our revenue generating products.

…”

While the circumstances and story behind this bytes, I’m glad to see Miguel and the Mono team have landed well (as well as can be). I wish them the best and will be keeping my eyes on Xamarin and Mono and expect to see so great things now that the shackles are off…