Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972) is a Mexican programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. 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. He came from a family of scientists in which his father is a physicist and his mother a biologist. 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. He was also one of the early contributors to the Wine project. 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. 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. With Ingo Molnar he wrote the original software implementation of RAID-1 and RAID-5 drivers of the Linux kernel. 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 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. 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. 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.