Summary: "Miguel and his team can expect to be spending much time in the company of lawyers," says The Guardian

Xamarin trademarks are an issue we wrote about before. It is an issue so prominent (yet under-covered) that should be enough to deter potential investors. Well, it turns out that our analysis was right on point even though nobody else covered those points. Microsoft's MVP de Icaza "set up Xamarin, a company with one purpose: to recreate the MonoTouch and MonoDroid products and create something called Xamarin Studio," explains the Bill Gates-funded Guardian (giving publicity to Mono).

Quoing further: "This idea seems strange when you look at it. Often when an employee of Company A leaves and sets up Company B that produces identical products those that he built whilst working for Company A, Company A will sue Company B out of existence. It's hard to see how Xamarin Studio can possibly have anything other than a very short life, unless of course Novell grants or sells the appropriate intellectual property over to Miguel's new organisation. I, for one, would feel far more confident about recommending MonoTouch and MonoDroid if they were more upfront about this.

“I've repeatedly asked Xamarin and Novell to comment on this issue, to no avail.”
      --The Guardian"To me this comes down to whether it was deliberately killed or whether it just stopped being of interest to Novell. Obviously if it was deliberately killed, Miguel and his team can expect to be spending much time in the company of lawyers. If Novell is just not particularly interested, I'm sure they'd welcome to competition. Perhaps they would even gift the IP over.

"I've repeatedly asked Xamarin and Novell to comment on this issue, to no avail."

Wow. Isn't that a bummer? So the whole project/company is at danger of being sued by more than one party. Typically they get coverage from Microsoft boosters who love promoting .NET. The funny thing is that in Planet SUSE we've just found 'The €«Banshee€» incident'. Mono gets a little less love in SUSE circles, which are mostly located in Europe (unlike Mono which is in the Boston area).

Almost nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that Canonical is dropping Evolution, just that it is embracing Thunderbird. Since Ubuntu already removes this one Novell/Ximian component, why not another (Banshee and Mono from Novell)? We shall see if Canonical comes to its senses and responds to the patent threat of Mono now that Microsoft extorts many companies using patents. we can always hope. ⬆