Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza

Mexican programmer, free software advocate
Date of Birth: 23.11.1972
Country: Mexico

Content:
  1. Early Life and Education
  2. GNOME and Ximian
  3. Mono and Novell
  4. Awards and Recognition
  5. Microsoft and Linux
  6. Personal Life

Early Life and Education

Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City to a physicist father and a biologist mother. While pursuing a degree in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he joined the GNU Project at age 18. His initial contribution was Midnight Commander, a file manager.

GNOME and Ximian

In 1997, de Icaza co-founded GNOME, an entirely free desktop environment for UNIX-like systems. In 1999, he co-founded Ximian with Nat Friedman. Ximian employed GNOME contributors and developed GNOME-oriented software.

Mono and Novell

In 2001, Ximian announced Mono, a project to create a full-fledged open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET platform. In 2003, Novell acquired Ximian, and its founders became vice presidents responsible for supporting and designing Linux projects.

Awards and Recognition

In 1999, de Icaza received the Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software and was named "Innovator of the Year" by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review magazine. In 2000, Time magazine included him in its list of 100 Innovators for the New Century.

Microsoft and Linux

In 2012, de Icaza stated that "Linux on the desktop was killed by Mac OS X." He attributed this to Linux's focus on developers and technical users, lack of backward compatibility, and incompatibilities among major Linux distributions.

Personal Life

In 2001, de Icaza had cameo roles in the films "The Net" and "The Code." In 2003, he married Brazilian Maria Laura. He became a US citizen in January 2015.

© BIOGRAPHS