The future is uncertain for MonoTouch and MonoDroid. Miguel de Icaza published a post (linked above) on his blog outlining what has gone down at Novell post Attachmate take over. Mono for iOS and Mono for Android development teams have all been fired, or laid off it has transpired!
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.
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.
So what about existing MonoTouch and MonoDroid customers? Attachmate are at the time of writing this failing to comment publicly or even acknowledge the split. Well the answer is that Xamarin will be building new tools to develop for .NET on mono mobile.
The new versions of .NET for the iPhone and Android will be source compatible with MonoTouch and Mono for Android. Like those versions, they will be commercial products, built on top of the open core Mono.
Currently there are many unhappy and worried MonoTouch developers out there and they all want answers from Attachmate. Quite rightly so!
