Attachmate's layoff almost certainly has nothing to do with the open-source viability of Mono and more to do with the difficulty of monetizing it. MonoVS, MonoTouch, and MonoDroid are fantastic projects, but the commercial demand for each is relatively low. There's probably not as much money there as was once thought.
(disclaimer: I'm a former Mono contributor and occasional user. I have no knowledge of this situation - this is the first I heard of it.)
I really don't know what you are basing you assumption on that most open-source developers dislike Mono, I know plenty that think its great as I do. A lot of pretty cool stuff is happening in the .Net world these days and Mono makes them available to us Linux and OS X developers. The only arguments I have heard against the project has been based on FUD.
Does the anti-Mono crowd just lay in wait for a negative story to further disseminate FUD? I've used Mono a few times and I just do not understand the treatment of Miguel and the project. The only answer I have ever deduced is that Mono is rooted in a Microsoft technology and the anti-Mono crowd apparently hates Microsoft.
OpenOffice is a single application. No one is going to have any trouble using that code base.
The correct comparison is to Java. Oracle is currently suing Google over Sun's patents on Java. And people are fleeing Java in droves. And the language around Mono's licensing of patents is pretty transparently designed to give Microsoft the option of suing people building on Mono.
I think the difference is that OpenOffice is done. It is more or less complete and usable right now (if arguably far from ideal). The Mono Project still many missing pieces (like tools for finding memory leaks or documentation). Compared to OpenOffice's, Mono's situation rides much more how much people expect that it will be maintained, adopted and get "traction" in the future.
That said, I don't know enough to say if Mono is "dead" or not.
Edit: I think this is also a quality of development frameworks as opposed to end-user applications. This is why developers were rightly concerned about the future when Nokia changed its development plans.
Unfortunately though the rest of my sentiment probably won't change and truthfully the video showing the 'integration' is just too much of a kludge for me to get past. I understand their are contraints outside the mono teams control, but I'm still not happy seeing that as the 'solution'. Maybe it's not the longterm solution, but as it stands right now, that's all I have to go on.
For instance when Nokia chose WP7 and C# over MeeGo and Qt, which lead to layoffs, resignations and other unpleasant consequences, Miguel DeIcaza looked for the positive aspects and declared that Nokia is simplifying the mobile landscape. [1] Similarly, we could now say that Attachmate is simplifying the cross-platform toolkit landscape...
"That’s just what I was saying Linux needed the other day: more Silverlight applications. In fact, I was discussing how promoting Silverlight development in no way whatsoever helps Microsoft lock-in, and quite the contrary actually encourages the spread of software freedom under every definition known to mankind. Because it is Microsoft that is internationally recognized for leverging its considerable power to promote user freedom and interoperability through its file formats and development technologies we absolutely need more of that being produced in the Linux world, which tends to use proprietary and obscured formats and languages"
