Co-authored with G. Forbes

Summary: Mono gets "angel funding" from an unnamed source

As we reported earlier, the people backing Mono and Moonlight recently lost their jobs at Novell. AttachMSFT was not interested in this bully-breeding project that is designed to popularise and spread patent-infested .NET. We at Techrights of course do not celebrate the fact that these people became unemployed, as we have explained several times before.

As expected, no other existing company or organisation has (at least externally) bothered to adopt Mono either. As a result, the developers have tried to regroup in a new company called Xamarin, which can be seen as a type of post-Ximian order. The founders registered a domain while masking their true identities, just like Microsoft lobbyists (e.g. Zuck/ACT) often do because there is something rogue to hide. It comes as no surprise then that the Mono cultists have apparently set up their private little establishment in Bellevue, Washington, according to whois (whois.net/whois/xamarin.com). Coincidently (or perhaps not so), this city happens to be where a great number of Microsoft executives live. It is even home to a few notable patent trolls including Intellectual Ventures. Why would Xamarin set up here and not Boston or Provo? This situation seems eerily similar to Outercurve needing to pretend that it is isolated from Microsoft [1, 2]. Outercurve even previously had no other than Miguel de Icaza on board. From the Xamarin.com domain's whois lookup:

Registrant Contact: Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc. Whois Agent ()

Fax: PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St - F1 C/O xamarin.com Bellevue, WA 98007 US

Administrative Contact: Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc. Whois Agent (swqjdfydd@whoisprivacyprotect.com) +1.4252740657 Fax: +1.4259744730 PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St - F1 C/O xamarin.com Bellevue, WA 98007 US

Technical Contact: Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc. Whois Agent (swqjdfydd@whoisprivacyprotect.com) +1.4252740657 Fax: +1.4259744730 PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St - F1 C/O xamarin.com Bellevue, WA 98007 US

Mono creator and Microsoft MVP de Icaza was also the one to first announce the formation of Xamarin and Fabian's remarks echo this announcement. Mr. de Icaza writes:

We do have some funding to get started and ship our initial products. But we are looking to raise more capital to address the shortcomings...

Larry Goldfarb, a key investor in SCO, once said that Microsoft's "Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop,' or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment.... Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar's investment in SCO."

Microsoft boosters are happy and other reports add more information.

In IRC, our reader Chips B. Malroy writes: "Miguel is not saying who is behind the funding if anyone, but we can guess [..]then M$ is still the source of money for Mono/Miguel [...] there is other news links on it, in one Miguel describes "angel funding" as the source [...]"

He quotes this: "The plan was Xamarian, and it already includes angel funding and a "couple of" engineering contracts to keep it afloat before the first products arrive."

We need to keep a close eye on Xamarin's source(s) of funding. These are the same people who did near-fatal damage to SUSE. The .NET mentality the Mono team promoted in SUSE has carried on in the planet recently [1, 2]. The hype typically comes from Ximian-affiliated people. Ximian's Nat is long gone and travelling while his former fellow Mono developers continue to chug the GTK# Kool-Aid and SUSE limits speech. ⬆