About 3 months ago, Mono founder Miguel de Icaza was laid off by Novell following their acquisition by Attachmate. Miguel was quick to launch his startup, Xamarin, which would be focusing on Mono based products. However, until now, the future of Mono remained unknown – would it exist? Would it need a rewrite?
Miguel cleared the air with his blog post announcing a few key points:
- SUSE to partner Xamarin in supporting Mono customers
- Xamarin has obtained a perpetual license to all the intellectual property of Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android, Mono for Visual Studio and will continue updating and selling those products.
- Xamarin will be providing the support for all of the existing MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono for Visual Studio customers.
- Developers will be able to purchase MonoTouch and Mono for Android from the Xamarin store. Existing customers will be able to purchase upgrades.
Miguel also mentioned that Xamarin will take over the care taking of the Mono open source community project. Commenting on the roadmap, Miguel mentioned that Xamarin would be looking at ensuring that all of the critical and major bugs are fixed. Xamarin will also be introducing priority support that can be purchased upon the first order of MonoTouch or Mono for Android. Existing customers can opt for an upgrade to get the priority support.
The announcement comes as a big relief for Mono developers and customers, who have been jittery since the first announcement of Attachmate’s acquisition of Novell and the subsequent layoff of the Mono team.