“Officials at Novell will soon dive into the world of
professional open source with paid support and services for Mono
1.0, an open source development platform based on version 1.1 of
the .NET framework.“Paid Mono support is the Waltham, Mass.-based company’s first
endeavor into professional open source, a term used to describe a
maintenance and support offering, with companies charging a fee for
services. According to Erik Dasque, a senior product manager at
Novell, the company’s Mono launch could be the beginning of an
initiative to expand into other open source projects. They include
Openswan, a Linux implementation of IPSec; iFolders, an enterprise
file-sharing project; and Yet Another Setup Tool (YaST), an
installation and administration tool…”