Nat Friedman | |
---|---|
Born | Nathaniel Dourif Friedman August 6, 1977 |
Nationality | American |
Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS) |
Known for | CEO of GitHub (2018–2021) |
Website | nat |
Nathaniel Dourif Friedman (born 6 August 1977 [1] ) 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. [2] [3]
Friedman attended and graduated from St. Anne's-Belfield School in 1996. [4]
In 1996, while a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Friedman befriended Miguel de Icaza on LinuxNet, the IRC network that Friedman had created to discuss Linux. As an intern at Microsoft, Friedman worked on the IIS web server. At MIT, he studied Computer Science and Mathematics and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1999. [5]
In 1999, Friedman co-founded Ximian (originally called International Gnome Support, [5] then Helix Code [6] ) with de Icaza to develop applications and infrastructure for GNOME, the project de Icaza had started with the aim of producing a free software desktop environment. The company was later bought by Novell in 2003. [7] [8]
At Novell, Friedman was the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Source until January 2010. [9] [7] [10] There he launched the Hula Project which began with the release of components of Novell NetMail as open source. [11] During his tenure, Novell began an effort to migrate 6,000 employees away from Microsoft Windows to SUSE Linux and from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. [12] [13] [14] Friedman's final project before his departure was work on SUSE Studio. [7]
During his sabbatical, Friedman created and hosted a podcast called Hacker Medley with friend and former Ximian employee Alex Graveley. [15] [16]
In May 2011, Friedman and de Icaza founded Xamarin, with Friedman as CEO. [10] The company was created to offer commercial support for Mono, a project that de Icaza had initiated at Ximian to provide a free software implementation of Microsoft's .NET software stack. At Xamarin they focused on continuing to develop Mono and MonoDevelop and marketing the cross-platform Xamarin SDK to developers targeting mobile computing devices and video game consoles. In 2016, Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft. [17]
With the June 2018 announcement of Microsoft's $7.5 billion (~$8.65 billion in 2023) acquisition of GitHub, the companies simultaneously announced that Friedman, then a Microsoft corporate vice president, would become GitHub's new CEO. [18] [19] [20] [21] GitHub's co-founder and then-current CEO Chris Wanstrath had been leading a search for his replacement since August 2017. [22] [23] Friedman assumed the role of CEO on the 29th of October 2018. [24] During his tenure as CEO, Friedman introduced a number of new products rapidly, including GitHub Copilot, GitHub Codespaces, a native GitHub mobile app for iOS and Android, the GitHub Advanced Security product, GitHub Sponsors to support open source developers financially, and a new GitHub CLI. Friedman also acquired six companies including NPM, Semmle, Dependabot, and PullPanda. He helped grow GitHub to an estimated value of $16.5 billion (~$19 billion in 2023), [25] more than double what Microsoft paid for GitHub in 2018. In November 2021, Friedman announced that he was stepping down as CEO. [26]
Friedman co-founded California YIMBY in 2017 to address California's housing shortage. [27]
In 2023, Friedman created nat.dev, a web interface for popular large language models. [28]
Alongside Daniel Gross, Friedman also has made significant investments in the AI space through a fund called C2 Investments, as well as running an AI grant program that gives funding and Microsoft Azure credits. [29] During the depositor run on Silicon Valley Bank in mid-March 2023, Friedman provided capital to multiple startups. [30]
He has been married to Stephanie Friedman (née Schatz) since 2009. [31] [32] They live in Menlo Park, having moved there from San Francisco after a home-invasion. [33]
Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects.
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.
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).
openSUSE is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: Tumbleweed, an upstream rolling release distribution, and Leap, a stable release distribution which is sourced from SUSE Linux Enterprise.
SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop computers.
SUSE is a Luxembourgish multinational open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers. Founded in 1992, it was the first company to market Linux for enterprise. It is the developer of SUSE Linux Enterprise and the primary sponsor of the community-supported openSUSE Linux distribution project. While the openSUSE "Tumbleweed" variation is an upstream distribution for both the "Leap" variation and SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution, its branded "Leap" variation is part of a direct upgrade path to the enterprise version, which effectively makes openSUSE Leap a non-commercial version of its enterprise product.
The Portland Project is an initiative by freedesktop.org aiming at easing the portability of application software between desktop environments and kernels by designing cross-platform APIs and offering implementations thereof as libraries to independent software vendors (ISVs).
Ettore Perazzoli was an Italian free software developer.
Comparison of the Java and .NET platforms.
MonoDevelop was an open-source integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its primary focus is development of projects that use Mono and .NET Framework. MonoDevelop integrates features similar to those of NetBeans and Microsoft Visual Studio, such as automatic code completion, source control, a graphical user interface (GUI) and Web designer. MonoDevelop integrates a Gtk# GUI designer called Stetic. It supports Boo, C, C++, C#, CIL, D, F#, Java, Oxygene, Vala, JavaScript, TypeScript and Visual Basic.NET. Although there is no word from the developers that it has been discontinued, nonetheless it hasn't been updated in 4 years and is no longer installable on major operating systems, such as Ubuntu 22.04 and above. Its parent Microsoft, seems to have shifted focus to Visual Studio Code and the .NET Framework, which runs on many operating systems, including Linux.
Moonlight is a discontinued free and open source implementation for Linux and other Unix-based operating systems of the Microsoft Silverlight application framework, developed and then abandoned by the Mono Project. Like Silverlight, Moonlight was a web application framework which provided capabilities similar to those of Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment.
GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
ZYpp is a package manager engine that powers Linux applications like YaST, Zypper and the implementation of PackageKit for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. Unlike some more basic package managers, it provides a satisfiability solver to compute package dependencies. It is a free and open-source software project sponsored by SUSE and licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 or later. ZYpp is implemented mostly in the programming language C++.
The .NET Framework is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until being superseded by the cross-platform .NET project. It includes a large class library called Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET Framework execute in a software environment named the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR is an application virtual machine that provides services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. As such, computer code written using .NET Framework is called "managed code". FCL and CLR together constitute the .NET Framework.
Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS, which are cross-platform implementations of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and Common Language Specifications.
Mono is a free and open-source .NET Framework-compatible software framework. Originally by Ximian, it was later acquired by Novell, and is now being led by Xamarin, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the .NET Foundation. Mono can be run on many software systems.
MonoGame is a free and open source C# framework used by game developers to make games for multiple platforms and other systems. It is also used to make Windows and Windows Phone games run on other systems. It supports iOS, Android, macOS, tvOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. It implements the Microsoft XNA 4 application programming interface (API). It has been used for several games, including Bastion, Celeste,Fez and Stardew Valley.
Chris Wanstrath is an American technology entrepreneur and programmer. He is the founder of Null Games, and the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. Wanstrath co-founded GitHub in 2008 and sold it to Microsoft in 2018. Before starting GitHub, he worked with CNET on GameSpot and Chowhound. In addition to GitHub, he created the Atom text editor, Ruby's Resque job queue, the Mustache templating language, and created the pjax JavaScript library. According to Forbes his net worth is estimated at US$1.8-2.2 billion and is listed in America's richest entrepreneurs under 40, as well as Fortune's 40 under 40 and he was named in CNBC's Disruptor 50 list.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.