Thing is Microsoft is already developing a lot of the stuff that makes Xamarin tick in the open source under liberal licenses - a lot of the legacy Mono tech already got replaced by CoreCLR equivalents, some are in the process or will be in the future. Eg. stuff like LLILC - IL -&gt; LLVM static compiler will make the AoT for iOS story work instead of using mono AoT - but that project is not usable right now.<p>Binding APIs are some work but not impossible for OSS community to replicate if the CoreCLR and friends provided a portable platform with liberal licensing - so even if Xamarin disappeared it could be replicated - but I see no reason for them to shut it down.<p>And the third part of Xamarin is tooling which they can roll up into their own product offering.<p>Basically acquihire is a good scenario in this case because Microsoft is already moving towards these areas, Xamarin brings in talent and a bridge with working tech to provide transition.