Attachmate's recent acquisition of troubled Linux vendor Novell has left a number of major open source software projects in limbo. Although Attachmate has vowed to continue supporting the SUSE Linux distribution, other prominent Novell open source products are going to be cast aside or left on life support due to cost cutting and staff reduction.

The Mono project, which produces an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET runtime and C# compiler, was dealt a serious blow earlier this month when Attachmate laid off the global Mono development team. Mono creator Miguel de Icaza responded to the tough break by assembling a plan to ensure that Mono will land on its feet and continue moving forward without Novell.

In a blog post on Monday, de Icaza announced the launch of Xamarin, a new startup that will focus on Mono development. He has secured funding to sustain the nascent company while it ramps up development and works to deliver its first products. Xamarin will employ many of the Mono developers who were dismissed by Attachmate during the recent layoffs.

Novell's strategy for monetizing Mono involved selling licenses for using the software in embedded environments. The company also offered commercial development frameworks that allowed application developers to build iOS and Android applications with C# and other .NET technologies.

Xamarin intends to build a business around cross-platform Mono development by creating its own new Android and iOS frameworks. The company also plans to port Moonlight, an open source Silverlight implementation, to both mobile operating systems. The new implementations will be "source compatible" with the previous Novell-owned frameworks, which means that existing MonoTouch and MonoDroid adopters will be able to transition with no technical difficulty.

"Our plan is to maximize the pleasure that developers derive from using Mono and .NET languages on their favorite platforms," wrote de Icaza. "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 that we could not afford to do before."

I spoke briefly with de Icaza at Google I/O last week. At the time, he was still putting plans together to prepare for the launch of Xamarin. He was frustrated with the Attachmate's lack of communication and the suddenness of its decision to lay off the Mono developers. Despite these challenges, he was highly optimistic about the opportunity to start over outside of Novell.

Although launching a startup and setting it on the path to success is not an easy undertaking, Xamarin has a few points in its favor. There is already strong demand and a well-established market for cross-platform mobile Mono development solutions—the original MonoTouch and MonoDroid products have proven to be popular among application developers.

Attachmate still owns the rights to the current MonoTouch and MonoDroid code, but it's unlikely that Attachmate will be able to continue supporting the products itself without a development team. Xamarin will likely be able to attract the existing users over to its own new implementations, which de Icaza says will be ready to go within the next three to five months.

The formation of Xamarin is a win for the broader Mono community because it will provide a new source of corporate backing for the open source project post-Novell. As a Mono-focused company, Xamarin may even be able to do more for Mono than Novell was willing to do during its stewardship of the project.

Listing image by James Davidson