Mono project IP in trouble?

This article appeared in my RSS reader today.

The global Mono project team has been laid off. Miguel De Icaza and his team have formed a new company (Xamarin) to continue development.

The problem for them is that their non-open source offerings - MonoTouch (Mono for iPhone / iPad) and MonoDroid (Mono for Android) (no mention of MonoMac) are owned by Novell's new owner, Attachmate. Attachmate obviously just wants whatever of Novell's assets it can get.

So there are a few questions.

Firstly, if MonoTouch and MonoDroid were the money making parts of the Mono Project and Xamarin can't own them, how are they going to continue to exist? Can they get sufficient work doing Mono consulting?

Secondly, what intellectual property risks are they running by trying to engineer replacements? These guys built the original products. Are Attachmate going to take legal action claiming ownership over their own personal knowledge? This is a possibility as they (Attachmate) could claim that they went to work for a competitor, building a competing product using intellectual property owned by Novell. How might this play out? How might a court separate the intellectual property owned by a company from the knowledge held by a group of developers (as individuals or collectively)?