As I guessed early this month, Mono has found a home.
The Linux .Net offering will now be housed in a start-up, Xamarin, which will be run by the same team, headed by lead developer Miguel de Icaza, that ran the Mono project.
As The Register reports, de Icaza claimed to be shocked (shocked) that he wasn't part of the plan when Novell was broken up and his bit was given to AttachMate, a small company with no heritage of doing anything so interesting as Mono.
The shock is a problem, because it's final proof that de Icaza was not brought up to run a business. He's a developer. Nothing wrong with that (writers aren't businessmen either) but given de Icaza's importance to the overall Mono project, it's a problem.
A start-up with angel funding sounds great, but it's a temporary solution. Someone with business sense needs to be put in charge, and needs to execute a business plan. That someone doesn't have to be someone who knows how to tie a tie (although, in the short term, it would be a good idea).
It could, in the end, be a foundation. The problem is that most foundations aren't in the business of handing developers money for nothing (or chicks for free). People who are associated with the foundation need to be behind the scenes, writing big checks, so the non-profit work of the foundation (including paying the developers and support people) can continue.
As I've said before, there is a someone who has a keen, vested interest in having Mono continue. Or something. It's called Microsoft. Without Mono, .Net doesn't have a cross-platform story it can tell. And that's a problem for Microsoft, a big problem, because every enterprise today uses multiple platforms.
My guess is whoever winds up running Xamarin (it won't be de Icaza, for reasons already explained) will be a Microsoft ex-. And if they get into trouble down the road, Microsoft's support will become more obvious, either through Mono moving to something like Outercurve or through Microsoft's explicit adoption of the project.
