Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a free software programmer from Mexico, best known for starting the GNOME project.
Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). 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 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 GNU/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 Gnumeric spreadsheet.
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.
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 had a cameo in the 2001 motion picture Antitrust.
He married Brazilian Maria Laura in 2003.
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