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Highly depends on what the deal between Xamarin and MS is. For example they could work out a deal with Xamarin where they would provide free access under same terms as Visual Studio community (the >5 people) and Microsoft could pay them more than enough to cover their loss while promoting their development stack.

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Doesn't Xamarin have a load of other stuff around testing and the like?

It could just mean a move away from Xamarin as a core development tool into producing things which support development on these platforms.

I highly doubt Microsoft will release and support Linux/OSX/iOS/Android API bindings.

What will likely happen is Microsoft will :

* open source the core libs

* open source the JIT

* make sure it works on all platforms

* open source the ASP.NET and port it to Linux/Mac so they can separate Azure from being a Windows only cloud service

Xamarin then packages these in to Mono and Xamarin.iOS/Android providing a layer on top of MS core stuff. Microsoft will then be able to sell .NET as a truly cross-platform solution and make VS/Azure more popular where it's probably losing to other OSS ATM.

I agree re Linux and OSX but I could see iOS and Android. The scale of mobile is such that if you want to be relevant in the way MS have historically, they're two platforms you can't ignore.

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