Problem is, with such high fees they have discouraged the adoption of all the students/starters/tester around the world.
Why corporation like microsoft are offering os, ides, tools and also devices free to develop to those categories of people? 'Cause if you make them learn maybe they will make/support the adoption of your platform in the professional field in which they will work.
This is why Xamarin fees are nonsense. It's ok to pay high fees in the professional field, but you must offer low fees for new entries. And not, indie costs (299*2/3) are not enough low, and the starter pack is just useless.
Partially agree. When I choose a technology for my project, I have to prove to my supervisor that technology is a good fit. In case of Mono.Touch, its usage leads to too many risks. What if Mono.Touch is bought by evil company like Oracle (see what happened to MySQL) or decides to abuse its user base by imposing crazy fees? What if the company fails, and who is going to maintain the solution in this case etc? In case of current license, the risks related to these questions are just too high.
The situation is very different here. The core IntelliJ is open source. There're plenty of open source alternatives. So if the license is changed, there're a plenty of options to migrate project to alternative IDEs.
In case of Xamarin, there's no such choice. Only Xamarin can compile C# to iOS, and if the license changes, the whole project implemented with the tool is locked in. The only option is to rewrite the whole project with alternative technology.
I think, LGPL open source core SDK + paid IDE + paid additional libraries would be a much better choice which mitigates the risk. But Xamarin for some reason decided to choose a different path.
Where exactly do you expect them to get the funds to develop this technology if they don't charge a reasonable fee to use it?