I thought Microsoft did help fund the project when it was part of Novel. In the end, having a healthy .net community is in Microsoft's best interest, even if there is not a direct set of sales involved.
I know they (MS) had an engineering agreement with the MONO folks while they were at Novell re:Silverlight, but I don't know of any instances where they've donated money. If you've got any links please share them.
This collaboration between Microsoft and Novell is a formal engineering development program. Novell is bringing the .NET-based Silverlight framework to Mono, an open source framework for running .NET applications on multiple platforms including Linux. Microsoft is providing a version of the necessary codecs for Linux.
