Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza, born on November 23, 1972 in Mexico City, is a Mexican-American programmer and activist best known for starting the GNOME, Mono and Xamarin projects. He studied mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico but left without a degree to work in IT, and began writing free software in 1992. One of his earliest programs for Linux was the Midnight Commander file manager in 1994, and with Ingo Molnar he wrote the original software implementation of the RAID-1 and RAID-5 drivers of the Linux kernel. He started GNOME with Federico Mena in August 1997 and co-founded Helix Code, later Ximian, in 1999. Ximian announced the Mono Project in 2001 to implement Microsoft's .NET platform on Linux and Unix-like systems, and in May 2011 de Icaza started Xamarin, which Microsoft acquired in February 2016. His support for Microsoft technologies drew criticism, including from Richard Stallman, and he received the Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1999.