MonoTouch requires Mac OS, and the Apple iPhone SDK in order to work. It does not run on any other operating system.

As for the licensing, all of the licenses receive 1 year of product updates, and are valid indefinitely. The $399 price is for an individual developer, the $999 is for a transferable license for a single developer in a corporate environment.

Thanks to the folks at Mono, C# and .NET have become much more than Microsoft oriented technologies, and this product has nothing to do with any past Microsoft deals that Novel made.

If people would actually take the time to learn about something before spouting off in a public forum (especially someone claiming to be a journalist) there would be a much lower rate of mis-informed zealotry going on in the open source world.

Thanks for lowering the bar on what can be considered journalism, you've done us all a great service...