The story
Founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman on Oct 19, 1999.1
Miguel de Icaza had a job interview at Microsoft in 1997 shortly before he started the GNOME project. At Microsoft he met Nat Friedman, who worked there as an intern. Afterwards they became good friends. In April 1999 Friedman came up with the idea to create a company to work on GNOME. The company was founded on 19 October 1999 as International GNOME Support, but its name was changed to Helix Code later. Because that name could not be trademarked the name was changed to Ximian on 10 January 2001.
Nat Friedman was the CEO of Ximian from its founding to 2001 when Ximian brought in David Patrick as CEO and President. Friedman became Vice President of Product Management. The company's business model was based on providing a mix of free and proprietary software, solutions and services. Ximian was a founding member of the GNOME Foundation and the Desktop Linux Consortium.
Ximian was acquired by Novell on 4 August 2003 to improve its offerings of Linux for the enterprise. Novell was in turn acquired by The Attachmate Group on 27 April 2011. In May 2011 The Attachmate Group laid off all its US staff working on Mono, which included De Icaza. He and Friedman then founded Xamarin on 16 May 2011, a new company to continue the development of Mono. On 24 February 2016, Microsoft announced that they had signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin.
From Wikipedia’s article on Ximian, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3