100's of Mono developers layed off today!

[GreyGeek]

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner...ono-emplo.html

Attachmate is moving swiftly to re-organize the Novell business it acquired for $2.2 billion.

Today Attachmate laid off an unknown number of U.S. based Novell developers that were working on the open source Mono project.

Some other sources put the number of Mono developers laid off at "100's"!

The big question is: what has happened to Miguel De Icaza? I've been following the his tweets here, but since the layoffs took place he has gone silent and is ignoring repeated requests to respond to the news story. He is a VP at Novell, but if Attachmate has dropped development of Mono what has Icaza got to preside over?

EDIT: about an hour ago he tweeted that "I was in Boston at the time" but has said nothing more.

[MoonRise]

Re: 100's of Mono developers layed off today!

[GreyGeek]

Re: 100's of Mono developers layed off today!

This news story said 800 Novell employees were laid off.

An employee said about 800 people lost their jobs company-wide, with most of those in Provo. He said the sales force, human resources, corporate operations and the legal department were particularly hard hit.

With the sale of Novell, "We all expected something. Nobody expected what we got," said the employee, who requested anonymity because he did not want to "burn any bridges."

He said the company plans to drop all but four of its product lines.

As a result of the merger, Novell stock stopped trading publicly Wednesday. The company also said it was selling patents to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium organized by Microsoft Corp., for $450 million.

Postings to a site that favors Mono don't think the situation is that serious. They point out that not all of Mono's dev staff paid by Novell was laid off, and there are developers who freely contribute to Mono. From my perspective, however, the loss of paid developers can be a serious problem for a software project. Novell was probably supplying laptops and servers to the paid dev staff. That's now gone. The software developers that remain working on the project will have to figure out how to supply and support the necessary hardware.

[GreyGeek]

Re: 100's of Mono developers layed off today!

Here is a story from TheRegister about Mono and Novell.

Attachmate Group's chief executive and chairman Jeff Hawn told InternetNews that the German city of Nuremberg has been "re-established" as the HQ for Novell's SuSE business.

"Prioritization and resourcing of certain development efforts - including Mono - will now be determined by the business unit leaders there [Nuremberg]," he said.

"This change led to the release of some US based employees today. As previously stated, all technology roadmaps remain intact with resources being added to those in a manner commensurate with customer demand."

Mono is a binary compatible implementation of C# and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) for Linux, Mac, and Unix that comes with tools that plug into Visual Studio. Mono was started in 2004 by well-known open sourcer Miguel de Icaza.

de Icaza is based in Boston, Massachusetts. There was no word on what's happened to him or how many members of the Mono team have gone. Novell would not comment beyond Hawn's statement, other than to that all technology roadmaps remain in place.

The comments are interesting.

What will the European division of Attachmate do with Mono? The question will be answered when Attachmate figures out how much net revenue Mono can generate.