Mono is no longer developed by Novell, but is developed by Xamarin which
was started by Miguel de Icaza after Attachmate which took over Novell axed
the Mono project and let its developers go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xamarin

http://xamarin.com/

This should be clear as mud. Microsoft has never got behind Mono and the
project lost lots of impetus before the Novell takeover. The biggest
problem is the lack of good apps and the size of including Mono on the ISO
image for the few applications that require it has just made it not a good
environment to work in. The idea was simple at first, but it soon became
apparent that there was little interest in porting .NET apps to Linux and
since portability was its greatest virtue, its goose was cooked from the
start.

Aside from this the whole licensing issue and lack of clarity never won
over Linux purists who avoided it like the plague. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) Read the Richard Stallman
passage in the
Mono and Microsoft's patents section.