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Miguel de Icaza

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Miguel de Icaza
Bornc. 1972
Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation(s)Software developer, Vice President of Developer Platform, Novell Inc.
SpouseMaria Laura
Websitehttp://www.tirania.org/blog

Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects.

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.

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 convince his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did with their own browser.

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.

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.

Miguel de Icaza was critical of the widespread criticism in the open source and free software community of Microsoft's OOXML standard[2]

Miguel has had cameo appearances in the 2001 motion pictures Antitrust and The Code.

Miguel de Icaza has been very critical of the July 2006 Mexican presidential elections. He has criticized Mexican president Felipe Calderón, calling him a "corrupt politician" [3], [4] and has published his findings about that year's elections in a report entitled, "Fraude en las elecciones del 2 de julio de 2006" [5] ("Fraud in the July 2nd, 2006 elections").

He married Brazilian Maria Laura [6] in 2003.

Interviews

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