Miguel de Icaza

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Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a free software programmer from Mexico, 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 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 a university degree 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 in August of that same year, with Federico Mena, 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, as well as the Linux kernel. He was also the creator of the spreadsheet program Gnumeric.

In 1999, De Icaza co-founded Helix Code, a GNOME-oriented free software company with Nat Friedman, and employed a large number of other GNOME hackers. In 2001, Helix Code, now renamed to Ximian, announced the Mono Project, a project led by De Icaza, to implement Microsoft's new .NET development platform on Linux and Unix-like platforms. In August 2003, Ximian was acquired by Novell. De Icaza is currently the Vice President of Developer Platforms at Novell.

Miguel de Icaza has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Free Software Award, 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 has had cameo appearances in the 2001 motion pictures Antitrust and The Code.

Miguel de Icaza has been very critical of the Mexican presidential elections of July 2006. He has criticized Mexican president Felipe Calderon as being a corrupt politician [1], [2] and has published his findings about the Mexican presidential elections of July 2nd, 2006 in a report entitled: "Fraude en las elecciones del 2 de julio de 2006" [3] ("Fraud in the July 2nd, 2006 elections").

He married Brazilian Maria Laura in 2003.