Miguel de Icaza took time out from his hectic starting-a-company schedule to chat with me this morning about his new Mono venture, Xamarin, which he and other Novell ex-pats are just getting off the ground. He announced the startup in his May 16 blog post, hot on the heels of news that Attachmate Corporation, which acquired Novell in April, had laid off virtually all members of the Mono team.
De Icaza was able to confirm those layoffs with some confidence, because he had to conduct them himself. "It really could have been worse," he said. "I had to say, hey, you're no longer employed, but then I could say, and neither am I."
De Icaza is, of course, the originator of the Mono Project, an open-source implementation of the .NET Framework based on C# and the Common Language Runtime (CLR). In 1999 he and Nat Friedman founded a company called Ximian, originally to provide Linux and Unix desktop apps based on the GNOME platform. That company became a driving force behind Mono, and it was acquired by Novell in 2003.
But Mono never truly flowered under Novell, de Icaza said, especially in the mobile space. In fact, one of the reasons he is sanguine about the layoffs is that he and his Mono mates have been trying to spinoff the technology from Novell for more than a year.
"We all thought that Mono could really shine on its own," de Icaza said. "For years we've been wrapped in this bubble of Novell, and our mobile efforts didn't align with the strategies of an infrastructure company. We pursued them because a lot of people asked us to do it, and we're passionate about it. I guess you could say that I welcome being laid off, because it gave us a reason to get together and do what we all wanted to do."
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