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 infam...