A few days after publicly asserting everything at Novell would be “business as usual”, Attachmate has turned around and announced the closing of the Mono project, laying off all developers on the project. It is not yet known if Miguel de Icaza, founder of the project, will remain with the Attachmate/Novell.

While Attachmate will be keeping SUSE Linux as a spin-off company, Mono, the open-source implementation of Windows’ .NET, is being shut down and there have been hundreds of additional Novell layoffs. So much for business as usual. “We have re-established Nuremburg [Germany] as the headquarters of our SUSE business unit and the prioritization and resourcing of certain development efforts–including Mono–will now be determined by the business unit leaders there. This change led to the release of some US based employees today. As previously stated, all technology road-maps remain intact with resources being added to those in a manner commensurate with customer demand.”

“800 people lost their jobs company-wide, with most of those in Provo.” The sales force, human resources, corporate operations and the legal department were particularly hard hit. Even before this, Novell’s top brass had been shown the door. If the 800 number is correct, that would be about 25% of the company’s worldwide workforce or 50% of its U.S. workers. These firings at a lower-level though came as a shock to the Novell staff. The source continued that in the aftermath of the Novell sale, “We all expected something. Nobody expected what we got.” He concluded that Attachmate/Novell plans to drop all but four of its product lines.

As Bradley Kuhn remarks, this is very bad news.

In the last few hours, I’ve seen some folks indicating that this is a good outcome. I worry that this sort of response is somehow inspired by the criticisms and concerns about Mono that software freedom advocates like myself raised. I thus seek to clarify the concerns regarding Mono, and point out why it’s unfortunate that these developers won’t work on Mono anymore. Mono should exist, for at least one important reason: some developers write lots and lots of new code on Microsoft systems in C#. If those developers decide they want to abandon Microsoft platforms tomorrow and switch to GNU/Linux, we don’t want them to change their minds and decide to stay with Microsoft merely because GNU/Linux lacks a C# implementation. Obviously, I’d support convincing those developers to learn another language system so they won’t write more code in C#, but initially, the lack of Free Software C# implementation might impede their switch to Free Software.

I am not aware of any software freedom advocate who wants Mono to cease to exist. The problem that I and others point out is this: it’s dangerous to write new code that relies on technology that’s likely patented by Microsoft — a company that’s knownto shake down or even sue Free-Software-using companies over patents. But the value of Mono (while much more limited than its strongest proponents claim) is still apparent and real: it has a good chance to entice developers living in a purely Microsoft environment to switch to a software freedom environment. It was therefore valuable that Novell was funding developers to work on Mono; it’s a bad outcome for software freedom that those developers will lose their jobs. Finally, while perhaps some of those developers might get jobs working on more urgent Free Software tasks, many will likely end up in jobs doing proprietary software development. And developers switching from Free Software work to proprietary software work is surely always a loss for software freedom.

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A few days after publicly asserting everything at Novell would be "business as usual", Attachmate has turned around and announced the closing of the Mono project, laying off all developers on the project. It is not yet known if Miguel de Icaza, founder of the project, will remain with the Attachmate/Novell. While Attachmate will be keeping ...