Miguel de Icaza | |
|---|---|
 De Icaza at 2005 MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, California. | |
| Born | November 23, 1972 Mexico City, Mexico |
| Citizenship | Mexican • American |
| Occupation | Software developer |
| Title | Distinguished Engineer |
| Spouse | Maria Laura de Icaza (m. 2003) |
| Children | 3 |
| Website | tirania |
Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972) [1] is a Mexican-American programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. [2]
De Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied Mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), but dropped out before getting a degree to work in IT. [3] He came from a family of scientists in which his father is a physicist and his mother a biologist. [4] He started writing free software in 1992.
One of the earliest pieces of software he wrote for Linux was the Midnight Commander file manager in 1994, a text-mode file manager. [5] He was also one of the early contributors to the Wine project. [6]
He worked with David S. Miller on the Linux SPARC port and wrote several of the video and network drivers in the port, as well as the libc ports to the platform. [7] They both later worked on extending Linux for MIPS to run on SGI's Indy computers and wrote the original X drivers for the system. [8] With Ingo Molnár he wrote the original software implementation of RAID-1 and RAID-5 drivers of the Linux kernel. [9]
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. [10] He said in an interview that he tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did so with their own browser. [11]
De Icaza started the GNOME project with Federico Mena in August 1997 to create a completely free desktop environment and component model for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. [12] He also created the GNOME 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, later 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. There, de Icaza was Vice President of Developer Platform.
In May 2011, de Icaza started Xamarin to replace MonoTouch and Mono for Android after Novell was bought by Attachmate and the projects were abandoned. Shortly afterwards, Xamarin and Novell reached an agreement where Xamarin took over the development and sales of these products. [13]
In February 2016, Xamarin announced being acquired by Microsoft. [14] One month later at the Microsoft Build conference, it was announced that the Mono Project would be relicensed to MIT, Visual Studio would include Xamarin (even the free versions) without restrictions, and Xamarin SDKs would be opensourced. [14]
De Icaza endorsed Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document standard, [15] [16] [17] disagreeing with a lot of the widespread criticism in the open source and free-software community.
He also developed Mono – a free and open-source alternative to Microsoft's .NET Framework – for GNOME. [18] This has raised much disagreement due to the patents that Microsoft holds on the .NET Framework.
De Icaza was criticized by Richard Stallman on the Software Freedom Day 2009, who labeled him as "Traitor to the Free Software Community". [19] Icaza responded on his blog to Stallman with the remark that he believes in a "world of possibility" and that he is open for discussions on ways to improve the pool of open source and free software. [20]
In August 2012, de Icaza criticized the Linux desktop as "killed by Apple". De Icaza specifically criticized a generally developer-focused culture, lack of backward compatibility, and fragmentation among the various Linux distributions. [21] [22] In March 2013, de Icaza announced on his personal blog that he regularly used macOS instead of Linux for desktop computing. [23]
In 2014 he joined Anders Hejlsberg on stage during the announcements of the .NET Foundation and the open sourcing of Microsoft's C# Compiler. He went on to serve on the board of directors of the .NET Foundation. [24] [25]
In March 2022 he announced he was leaving Microsoft and taking some time off. [26]
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, [27] and was named one of Time magazine's 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000.
In early 2010 he received a Microsoft MVP Award. [28]
In March 2010, he was named as the fifth in the "Most Powerful Voices in Open Source" by MindTouch. [29]
De Icaza has had cameo appearances in the 2001 motion pictures Antitrust and The Code. [30]
He married Maria Laura Soares da Silva (now Maria Laura de Icaza) in 2003. [31] They have three children. [32]
De Icaza and his wife are critical of the actions of the state of Israel towards the Palestinians in the Middle East and has blogged about the subject and visited the area of conflict as well. [33] On Twitter, De Icaza has rejected the claim that Hamas committed mass rape [34] when they attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. [35]
Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME Free Software Desktop Project. Gnumeric version 1.0 was released on 31 December 2001. Gnumeric is distributed as free software under the GNU General Public License; it is intended to replace proprietary spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel. Gnumeric was created and developed by Miguel de Icaza, but he has since moved on to other projects. The maintainer as of 2002 was Jody Goldberg.
Ximian, Inc. was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman in 1999 and was bought by Novell in 2003. Novell continued to develop Ximian's original products, while adding support for its own GroupWise and ZENworks software.
In computing, cross-platform software is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software requires a separate build for each platform, but some can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, being written in an interpreted language or compiled to portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all supported platforms.
GNOME Evolution is the official personal information manager for GNOME. It has been an official part of GNOME since Evolution 2.0 was included with the GNOME 2.8 release in September 2004. It combines e-mail, address book, calendar, task list and note-taking features. Its user interface and functionality is similar to Microsoft Outlook. Evolution is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Nathaniel Dourif Friedman is an American technology executive and investor. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of GitHub and former chairman of the GNOME Foundation. Friedman is currently a board member at the Arc Institute and an advisor of Midjourney.
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The history of free and open-source software begins at the advent of computer software in the early half of the 20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, computer operating software and compilers were delivered as a part of hardware purchases without separate fees. At the time, source code—the human-readable form of software—was generally distributed with the software, providing the ability to fix bugs or add new functions. Universities were early adopters of computing technology. Many of the modifications developed by universities were openly shared, in keeping with the academic principles of sharing knowledge, and organizations sprung up to facilitate sharing.
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Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.
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Midnight Commander was started by Miguel de Icaza and he is the maintainer of the package. Other authors have joined the project later.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Author: Miguel de Icaza
Copyright: (C) 1996, 1997 Ingo Molnar, Miguel de Icaza, Gadi Oxman
I want to say that God loves all creatures. From the formidable elephant to the tiniest ant. And that includes Richard Stallman. As for me, I think that there is a world of possibility, and if Richard wants to discuss how we can improve the pool of open source/free software in the world he has my email address. Love, Miguel.
1999 Innovator of the Year: Miguel De Icaza
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