Miguel de Icaza | |
|---|---|
 De Icaza in 2021 | |
| Born | (1972-11-23)November 23, 1972 (age 53) Mexico City, Mexico |
| Citizenship | Mexican ·American |
| Alma mater | National Autonomous University of Mexico (dropped out) |
| Occupation | Software developer |
| Title | Distinguished Engineer |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
| Website | tirania |
Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972)[1] is aMexican-Americanprogrammer andactivist, best known for starting theGNOME,Mono, andXamarin projects.[2]
De Icaza was born inMexico City and studied Mathematics at theNational Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), but dropped out before getting a degree to work inIT.[3] He came from a family of scientists in which his father is a physicist and his mother a biologist.[4] He started writingfree software in 1992.
One of the earliest pieces of software he wrote for Linux was theMidnight Commander file manager in 1994, a text-mode file manager.[5] He was also one of the early contributors to theWine project.[6]
He worked withDavid S. Miller on the LinuxSPARC 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 forMIPS to run on SGI'sIndy computers and wrote the original X drivers for the system.[8] WithIngo Molnár he wrote the original software implementation ofRAID-1 andRAID-5 drivers of theLinux kernel.[9]
In summer of 1997, he was interviewed byMicrosoft for a job in theInternet Explorer Unix team (to work on aSPARC port), but lacked the university degree required to obtain a workH-1B visa.[10] He said in an interview that he tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even beforeNetscape did so with their own browser.[11]
De Icaza started theGNOME project with Federico Mena in August 1997 to create a completely free desktop environment and component model forLinux and otherUnix-like operating systems.[12] He also created the GNOME spreadsheet program,Gnumeric.
In 1999, de Icaza, along withNat 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 renamedXimian, announced theMono Project, to be led by de Icaza, with the goal to implementMicrosoft's new.NET development platform onLinux andUnix-like platforms. In August 2003, Ximian was acquired byNovell. There, de Icaza wasVice President of Developer Platform.
In May 2011, de Icaza startedXamarin to replace MonoTouch and Mono forAndroid after Novell was bought byAttachmate 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 berelicensed to MIT, Visual Studio would include Xamarin (even the free versions) without restrictions, and Xamarin SDKs would be opensourced.[14]
De Icaza endorsed Microsoft'sOffice Open XML (OOXML) document standard,[15][16][17] disagreeing with a lot of the widespread criticism in theopen source andfree-software community.
He also developedMono – 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 byRichard Stallman on theSoftware 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 ofopen source and free software.[20]
In August 2012, de Icaza criticized theLinux desktop as "killed by Apple". De Icaza specifically criticized a generally developer-focused culture, lack ofbackward compatibility, and fragmentation among the various Linux distributions.[21][22] In March 2013, de Icaza announced on his personal blog that he regularly usedmacOS instead of Linux for desktop computing.[23]
In 2014 he joinedAnders Hejlsberg on stage during the announcements of the.NET Foundation and the open sourcing of Microsoft'sC# Compiler. He went on to serve on theboard 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 theFree Software Foundation 1999Award for the Advancement of Free Software, theMITTechnology Review Innovator of the Year Award 1999,[27] and was named one ofTime magazine's 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000.
In early 2010 he received aMicrosoft MVP Award.[28]
In March 2010, he was named as the fifth in the "Most Powerful Voices in Open Source" byMindTouch.[29]
De Icaza has hadcameo appearances in the 2001 motion picturesAntitrust andThe Code.[30]
He married Maria Laura Soares da Silva (now Maria Laura de Icaza) in 2003.[31] They have three children.[32] He has been living in the state ofMassachusetts for 20 years.
De Icaza and his wife are critical of the actions of the state ofIsrael towards thePalestinians in the Middle East and has blogged about the subject and visited the area of conflict as well.[33]
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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