Developing applications for Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone is big business, and it's one that Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) wants a piece of. Novell today released new software called MonoTouch that aims to bring .NET applications to the iPhone.

MonoTouch is based on Novell's Mono project, which is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework. Unlike Mono, MonoTouch is neither free nor open source and is being sold as a commercial product by Novell. With MonoTouch, Novell is expanding the developer base for iPhone applications beyond just C to include .NET and its millions of global developers.

Miguel de Icaza, vice president for developer platforms at Novell, explained that MonoTouch is built from the same source code base as Mono, but there are some differences.

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