Miguel de Icaza
Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a
Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the
GNOME and
Mono projects.
Biography
Early years
Miguel de Icaza was born in
Mexico City and studied at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists in which his father was a physicist and his mother a biologist.
(1) He started writing free software in 1992.
Later years
In summer of 1997, he was interviewed by
Microsoft for a job in the
Internet Explorer Unix team (to work on a
SPARC port), but lacked the university degree required to obtain a work
H-1B visa. He declared in an
interview that he tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before
Netscape did with their own browser.Miguel de Icaza was critical of the widespread criticism in the open source and free software community of Microsoft's
OOXML standard.
(2)GNOME and Mono
De Icaza started the
GNOME project with
Federico Mena in August of that same year to create a completely free desktop environment and component model for
Linux and other
Unix-like operating systems. Earlier, De Icaza had worked on the
Midnight Commander file manager and the
Linux kernel. He also created the spreadsheet program
Gnumeric.In 1999, De Icaza, along with
Nat Friedman, co-founded
Helix Code, a GNOME-oriented free software company that employed a large number of other GNOME hackers. In 2001, Helix Code, now renamed
Ximian, announced the
Mono Project, to be led by De Icaza, with the goal to implement
Microsoft's new
.NET development platform on
Linux and
Unix-like platforms. In
August 2003, Ximian was acquired by
Novell, Inc. There, De Icaza is currently the
Vice President of Developer Platform.
Awards and recognition
Miguel de Icaza has received the
Free Software Foundation 1999
Award for the Advancement of Free Software, the
MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award 1999, and was named one of
Time Magazine's 100 innovators for the new century in
September 2000.
Personal life
Miguel has had
cameo appearances in the 2001
motion pictures Antitrust and
The Code.He married
Brazilian Maria Laura in 2003.
References
-
[WEB, Inteview with Miguel De Icaza,weblink Linux Journal, 2008-08-19, ]
-
[WEB, OOXML. (Score:4, Informative),weblink Slashdot, 2008-08-19, ]
External links
Interviews
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