Miguel (Premium)

As you may have seen, Miguel de Icaza is leaving Microsoft. But what you might not know is how important this man is, to Microsoft and to personal computing in general. And maybe more to the point, what an incredible human being he is.

For those unfamiliar, Miguel de Icaza is one of the biggest and most important names in open-source software. In the early 1990s, he was an early contributor to the Wine project, which allows Linux users to run an ever-longer list of Windows applications on that platform. And he created the GNU Midnight Commander file manager, a Norton Commander clone.

But he is better known for his later work: he co-created the GNOME project in 1997 to create a free desktop environment for Linux that could rival that of Windows or the Mac. And he created the Gnumeric spreadsheet application for GNOME. And then he co-created Helix Code, later renamed to Ximian, and announced the Mono project with the goal of porting .NET to Linux. And this is where things get interesting.

As you may know, I’ve recently published numerous new articles in my Programming Windows series, and this recent work covers what I think of as the “.NET era,” meaning the period of time from when Microsoft first announced .NET in 2001 until today. Most of what I’m writing about is not .NET-specific, per se, but .NET was at first heavily influenced by the goals of the Microsoft of 2001, which were quite Windows-centric, and .NET conversely heavily influenced Microsoft from a software development perspective from that point on as well.

As originally envisioned, .NET was a new development platform and runtime for Windows, and only for Windows. It would be used for creating rich Windows applications, and to deliver web services, which sounds open, but wasn’t: those services were delivered via Windows Servers only. But because the world was shifting so strongly to the web in the early 2000s, and to set it up as a direct competitor to Java, Microsoft also took the curious step of standardizing parts of .NET, including the .NET Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and the C# programming language. And that meant that others were free to implement the open parts of .NET on other platforms. The interfaces were known, but these third parties would need to come up with their own implementations.

And that’s exactly what Miguel and his team did with Mono, though they took it a step further by trying to create a version of the .NET Framework for Linux as well. This, despite some concerns about Microsoft’s patents and whether it would try to thwart their efforts: the .NET Framework was proprietary and not covered by Microsoft’s standardization efforts.

In August 2003, Novell—then still considered a Microsoft competitor—acquired Ximian, allowing the firm to stay in Boston and continue its work on Mono. But Microsoft, sensing the importance of .NET compatibility on rivals platforms, attempted to woo Miguel away from Novell. At the infamous PDC 2003 conference in Los Angeles, I was among the onlookers who witnessed an incredible event: Microsoft’s Don Box, the singer for an impromptu band called “Band on the Runtime” (an homage of sorts to the Paul McCartney and Wings album “Band on the Run”), crooned the Beatles song “Michelle” to Miguel on a rooftop bar in LA, but using new words in which the title of the song was changed to “Miguel.”

It was cringeworthy at best, and Miguel wasn’t swayed. He stayed with Novell, continued his work on Mono, and Microsoft moved on to evolve Longhorn’s WinFX into the .NET Framework 3.0, which was still proprietary to Windows.

By 2011, Miguel and his team had evolved Mono to include open versions of .NET for the iPhone and Android, but Novell was failing, and it was acquired by Attachmate that April. And, incredibly, the new company laid off Miguel and planned to kill Mono. So Miguel started a new company, Xamarin, and pledged to continue to support the open-source effort.

Also by 2011, the world had changed. Microsoft’s power over the personal computing industry had peaked and was fading, and its newest hires—and many existing employees—were pushing it to embrace open-source. And Miguel, who had endorsed Microsoft’s XML-based Open Office XML data formats, had, as a result, become a “Traitor to the Free Software Community” in the words of insane person Richard Stallman.

Regardless, Miguel and Microsoft were moving closer to each other. In 2014, Microsoft attempted to acquire Ximian, and it separately announced that it would open-source .NET, making it officially available across platforms. To make that transition, Microsoft had to rewrite .NET from scratch, in part because much of the source code base was proprietary, licensed, and/or covered by patents. And do it undertook a multi-year effort to do so, starting with something called .NET Core, and completing the job in 2020 with .NET 5. (Or in 2021 with .NET 6, depending on whom you ask.)

More to the point, Microsoft succeeded in acquiring Ximian in 2016, bringing Miguel on board to lead the newly fully open Xamarin efforts. He was part of the .NET Foundation announcement that year as well.

So. Why is Miguel so important?

Had he not started Mono, Microsoft would never have transitioned .NET to be a more open platform—and then a truly open platform—over time. And .NET , or WinFX, or whatever they called it, would have simply died a slow and painful death as a proprietary Microsoft platform that targeted only Windows. But .NET today is open, and cross-platform, and it is growing again.

And Miguel is the humblest person I’ve ever met. At one of our “Build Blogger Bash” parties in San Franciso several years ago, Rafael Rivera and I were standing around when a man approached us and asked us what we did. After explaining ourselves, I naturally asked him what he did. He said, “I work to bring to .NET to Linux and other platforms.” Rafael and I looked at each other. Looked back at him. Looked at each other. And figured it out. “You’re … Miguel de Icaza,” I finally said. And we all laughed. Amazing.

With Microsoft transitioning Xamarin Forms to .NET MAUI now—and targeting desktop platforms like Windows and the Mac in addition to iPhone and Android—one would assume that Miguel was leading those efforts. But he wasn’t: instead, he had landed in the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) team, which is working on an open standard for machine learning. Listening to .NET Rocks episode 1779—Twenty Years of .NET with Miguel de Icaza—recently, I was curious why this interested him.

Apparently, it did not: he announced this week that he was leaving Microsoft, in part because he misses the startup world.

“If I wanted to work for a big company, I would have stayed here (at Microsoft),” he told Mary Jo Foley. “It is awesome here. I learned a lot, it was good, but I do miss the startup world, and building and running a team, which I have not been doing here in this role.”

This makes sense to me. And obviously, I wish him the best. But more importantly, I want everyone to understand what a difference Miguel has made in this world. He is truly a unique individual.