Miguel de Icaza (Gnome)
 | By jorgerosa |
Who is Miguel de Icaza? Miguel de Icaza is the GNOME co-founder and MONO founder, and currently lives in Boston, USA. He was born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico. He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists - his father was a physicist, and his mother a biologist. In 1997 he was interviewed by Microsoft for a position in the Internet Explorer UNIX team, but lacked the university degree to obtain a US work visa; at the same time, the tried to persuade his interviewers to release the IE source code. The GNOME project provides two things: The GNOME desktop environment, an intuitive and attractive desktop for users, and the GNOME development platform, an extensive framework for building applications that integrate into the rest of the desktop. Today millions of users use GONME desktop environment - the default environment on many distributions: UBUNTU, OpenSuse, Debian, etc. So, when you power on your beloved UBUNTU, and you see all the marvelous graphics and stuff on your screen, all very well organized, in a “click and play” style, please keep in mind that all of this is possible due to a man’s hard work and dedication - a man named Miguel de Icaza.
Miguel de Icaza has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, 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.
What is your position in GNOME?
I co-founded the project, started a company around it to accelerate its development and these days my contribution is mostly aimed at helping others build great applications for it.
How did it all started?
Around 1992 I started working on free software after using various pieces of GNU software and I started running Linux around this time as well. I loved free software, and I loved the community that had been created around it. A lot of developers that believed strongly in having a free operating system with source code for everything. These programmers devoted all of their time and attention to making this happen.
The early 90’s were a fascinating time for free software as things started to take shape. The GNU project had created some important pieces of the free software stack, but it was lacking a kernel. At the time GNU was working on a very ambitious projects called the GNU Hurd but this started to become more and more like Duke Nukem: everyone talked about it, but it kept getting delayed. Every six months the FSF would publish a progress update on their bulletin, but nothing would come out of it.
Then Linux came along and everything changed. It crystalized various groups into a common goal: creating a full operating system. The developers around this time took bits and pieces from any place they could: bits of BSD code, bits of GNU code, bits of X11 and Usenet code and they filled the gaps with anything that they had at their disposal. On this foundation that was self-hosting a community of developers that filled in the gaps of Linux was born. And these people worked tirelessly on every possible direction: implementing shared libraries, the ELF system, the X server, the windowing toolkits, console applications and more.
There was a very vibrant contributor community in IRC in a network called LinuxNet, and many of the contributors that laid the foundation of modern Linux used to be in the #linux channel there.
At this point Linux had the upper hand: it was a full 32-bit operating system, it was multi-tasking, it ran Unix and user applications in general did not bring down the system. Compare this to Windows at the time that only had cooperative multi-tasking and was very easy to crash by user code. X11 was sadly too big and too slow at the time so running a GUI system on Linux was both slow and hard to develop for.
There was a mixed set of GUI frameworks at the time, and GUI applications that had been created, and even some office suites (and sadly, I do not even remember the name of them!) brought to Linux.
KDE emerged out of the lack of integration, and they had done a brilliant job at getting a desktop environment to Linux. When it came out, I was mostly interested in the Linux kernel, and I was good friends with Erik Troan at Red Hat. I reached out to both Richard Stallman and Erik Troan. Both of them within a couple of days raised the problem with the Qt license, the foundation on which KDE was built: a free system could not be built on top of that.
At the time a handful of great hackers had put together not only a gigantic application (the GIMP) but also a toolkit (Gtk+) and it was mostly written by two guys, Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. Federico Mena was contributing to the GIMP from a lab that we had in the University and we were dismayed that about the Qt licensing problem.
We wanted to have a free desktop and we looked at a couple of options available at the time. We could re-implement Qt as an open source project, but considering the size of KDE at the time and the size of Qt, it seemed like a lot of work to us. We also looked at GNUstep, but it was a very demanding system at the time. It barely ran on the best machine that we had at our disposal, a SparcStation 20 with 64 megs of RAM and that had Display Postscript. Running on Linux was just too slow. Every PC that we had access to did not even have that kind of power, so we decided to pick the Gtk+ toolkit for the project.
The original effort was launched by an interesting combination of people: LinuxNet developers, including the great Elliot Lee; GIMP contributors, GNU and Scheme developers (as originally we had planned on using GNU’s scheme implementation for some of the apps).
Although Scheme was nice in that you could develop applications faster and with fewer lines of code, back in 1997 the Guile startup time was somewhere around ten seconds with a lot of swapping going on, so developers moved on to different languages, mostly C at the time.
How many developers working in GNOME?
I do not know if it is possible to find out how many people work on Gnome today. There are many companies that contribute either to core libraries, auxiliary libraries, applications directly part of Gnome, or satellite applications. And then there are various communities that have grown own of Gnome like Maemo and Moblin.
A good indication is that every year the Gnome conference gets larger. Very early on the life of Gnome we -as a community- made a conscious effort to be friendly to companies that wanted to contribute, adopt and redistribute Gnome or parts of Gnome. The steering committee was formed in 1999 in Paris and that morphed quickly into the Gnome Foundation a year or two later.
What can we expect from GNOME in the future?
Better, faster, more user friendly…
What is your favourite GNU/Linux Distro?
I like them all equally. Currently I am using OpenSUSE for my development machines, but we have a mix of machines running Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora in my team.
What is your oppinion about Ubuntu?
I love it. Mark managed to get Linux to the hands of hundreds of thousands of people that would have never used Linux or Gnome before.
What do you feel about Ubuntu adopt GNOME?
I loved it. It was amazing.
What are your favourite Games?
These days I enjoy Sudoku and programming very much. I enjoy playing a number of video games: various forms of tower defense (very addictive) to games that have a plot and keep me playing because of the game’s narrative. I enjoyed Metroid 3, Ratchet and Clank, Bioshock, Resistance 2, The Simpsons and Mass Effect.
What are you playing at the moment?
SheepStacker on the iPhone. I am waiting for the next big and great story telling game.
What are your favourite GNU/Linux Applications?
Firefox, Pidgin, X-Chat, Gnome Do, Banshee, F-Spot, MonoDevelop, Evolution, Emacs, Midnight Commander, Monsoon and of course, Mono. There are probably many more that I am forgetting…
Why creating MONO?
As we were writing Evolution, we went through a lot of pain with building a very large, multi-threaded, multi-component application in C. As we were thinking “There must be a better way”, Microsoft came up with the C# language specification and the .NET specification. C# was fascinating as a language, specially for the kind of application that we were building, and .NET’s technology to integrate with other languages and to interoperate with other systems was of great interest to us. We wanted Linux to have as good as a developer platform as Windows developers were about to get. We have pretty much succeeded in this goal. The one thing that I regret is not having a working debugger for Mono earlier on.
What can we wait from MONO in a future?
It will grow in a number of areas: We will continue to bring Mono to more platforms and we will continue to tune it. Continue to innovate: Now that Mono is a viable .NET alternative, you have seen us innovate in many areas. We are no longer playing catch-up so we have started to address many new ideas and gaps from our community. For example we added SIMD support to Mono to help the gaming industry, static compilation to bring Mono to the iPhone, created an interactive C# interpreter and evaluator and much more.
We will continue to bring APIs that people need on an open source .NET implementation. We will continue our work to bring .NET not only to Linux users but users in other platforms.
And lastly, we will continue to work with developers in the open source .NET ecosystem to bring new technologies to the .NET/Mono space. For example a few years ago we wanted to get people to use Bittorrent for downloading files instead of using HTTP GET. We started a project through the Google Summer of Code that Alan McGovern did, and today BitSharp is used by many commercial companies to distribute their updates.
We also built a native client for Linux to use Alan’s great state-of-the-art bittorrent library. There will be many things like that. Performance and optimizations is something that we do routinely: we constantly monitor what Mono is doing wrong, or how it could do things better.
Are you now in other projects?
I mostly work on Mono and the Gtk# ecosystem, but we have branched out into a few other platforms. We now have Mono on the Wii and the PS3, so we have done work to help game developers use Mono on those platforms. We are also working on an easy-to-use and supported version of Mono for the iPhone that we should be announcing shortly.
Miguel de Icaza in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza
GNOME in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME
MONO in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)
Midnight Commander in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Commander
ubuntumagazine.org would like to THANKS to Miguel de Icaza for the nice interview. C de-Avillez ( website ) for spell/grammar check. The credits for the main photo (Miguel de Icaza at MySQL Conference 2005) goes to James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media - Wikipedia.
More articles in: Featured Articles, Interviews
Please, help us to keep this free project updated and alive. THANKYOU!
Article created by: jorgerosa.
Who is Miguel de Icaza? Miguel de Icaza is the GNOME co-founder and MONO founder, and currently lives in Boston, USA. He was born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico. He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists - his father was a physicist, and his mother a biologist. In 1997 he was interviewed by Microsoft for a position in the Internet Explorer UNIX team, but lacked the university degree to obtain a US work visa; at the same time, the tried to persuade his interviewers to release the IE source code. The GNOME project provides two things: The GNOME desktop environment, an intuitive and attractive desktop for users, and the GNOME development platform, an extensive framework for building applications that integrate into the rest of the desktop. Today millions of users use GONME desktop environment - the default environment on many distributions: UBUNTU, OpenSuse, Debian, etc. So, when you power on your beloved UBUNTU, and you see all the marvelous graphics and stuff on your screen, all very well organized, in a “click and play” style, please keep in mind that all of this is possible due to a man’s hard work and dedication - a man named Miguel de Icaza.
Miguel de Icaza has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, 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.
What is your position in GNOME?
I co-founded the project, started a company around it to accelerate its development and these days my contribution is mostly aimed at helping others build great applications for it.
How did it all started?
Around 1992 I started working on free software after using various pieces of GNU software and I started running Linux around this time as well. I loved free software, and I loved the community that had been created around it. A lot of developers that believed strongly in having a free operating system with source code for everything. These programmers devoted all of their time and attention to making this happen.
The early 90’s were a fascinating time for free software as things started to take shape. The GNU project had created some important pieces of the free software stack, but it was lacking a kernel. At the time GNU was working on a very ambitious projects called the GNU Hurd but this started to become more and more like Duke Nukem: everyone talked about it, but it kept getting delayed. Every six months the FSF would publish a progress update on their bulletin, but nothing would come out of it.
Then Linux came along and everything changed. It crystalized various groups into a common goal: creating a full operating system. The developers around this time took bits and pieces from any place they could: bits of BSD code, bits of GNU code, bits of X11 and Usenet code and they filled the gaps with anything that they had at their disposal. On this foundation that was self-hosting a community of developers that filled in the gaps of Linux was born. And these people worked tirelessly on every possible direction: implementing shared libraries, the ELF system, the X server, the windowing toolkits, console applications and more.
There was a very vibrant contributor community in IRC in a network called LinuxNet, and many of the contributors that laid the foundation of modern Linux used to be in the #linux channel there.
At this point Linux had the upper hand: it was a full 32-bit operating system, it was multi-tasking, it ran Unix and user applications in general did not bring down the system. Compare this to Windows at the time that only had cooperative multi-tasking and was very easy to crash by user code. X11 was sadly too big and too slow at the time so running a GUI system on Linux was both slow and hard to develop for.
There was a mixed set of GUI frameworks at the time, and GUI applications that had been created, and even some office suites (and sadly, I do not even remember the name of them!) brought to Linux.
KDE emerged out of the lack of integration, and they had done a brilliant job at getting a desktop environment to Linux. When it came out, I was mostly interested in the Linux kernel, and I was good friends with Erik Troan at Red Hat. I reached out to both Richard Stallman and Erik Troan. Both of them within a couple of days raised the problem with the Qt license, the foundation on which KDE was built: a free system could not be built on top of that.
At the time a handful of great hackers had put together not only a gigantic application (the GIMP) but also a toolkit (Gtk+) and it was mostly written by two guys, Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. Federico Mena was contributing to the GIMP from a lab that we had in the University and we were dismayed that about the Qt licensing problem.
We wanted to have a free desktop and we looked at a couple of options available at the time. We could re-implement Qt as an open source project, but considering the size of KDE at the time and the size of Qt, it seemed like a lot of work to us. We also looked at GNUstep, but it was a very demanding system at the time. It barely ran on the best machine that we had at our disposal, a SparcStation 20 with 64 megs of RAM and that had Display Postscript. Running on Linux was just too slow. Every PC that we had access to did not even have that kind of power, so we decided to pick the Gtk+ toolkit for the project.
The original effort was launched by an interesting combination of people: LinuxNet developers, including the great Elliot Lee; GIMP contributors, GNU and Scheme developers (as originally we had planned on using GNU’s scheme implementation for some of the apps).
Although Scheme was nice in that you could develop applications faster and with fewer lines of code, back in 1997 the Guile startup time was somewhere around ten seconds with a lot of swapping going on, so developers moved on to different languages, mostly C at the time.
How many developers working in GNOME?
I do not know if it is possible to find out how many people work on Gnome today. There are many companies that contribute either to core libraries, auxiliary libraries, applications directly part of Gnome, or satellite applications. And then there are various communities that have grown own of Gnome like Maemo and Moblin.
A good indication is that every year the Gnome conference gets larger. Very early on the life of Gnome we -as a community- made a conscious effort to be friendly to companies that wanted to contribute, adopt and redistribute Gnome or parts of Gnome. The steering committee was formed in 1999 in Paris and that morphed quickly into the Gnome Foundation a year or two later.
What can we expect from GNOME in the future?
Better, faster, more user friendly…
What is your favourite GNU/Linux Distro?
I like them all equally. Currently I am using OpenSUSE for my development machines, but we have a mix of machines running Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora in my team.
What is your oppinion about Ubuntu?
I love it. Mark managed to get Linux to the hands of hundreds of thousands of people that would have never used Linux or Gnome before.
What do you feel about Ubuntu adopt GNOME?
I loved it. It was amazing.
What are your favourite Games?
These days I enjoy Sudoku and programming very much. I enjoy playing a number of video games: various forms of tower defense (very addictive) to games that have a plot and keep me playing because of the game’s narrative. I enjoyed Metroid 3, Ratchet and Clank, Bioshock, Resistance 2, The Simpsons and Mass Effect.
What are you playing at the moment?
SheepStacker on the iPhone. I am waiting for the next big and great story telling game.
What are your favourite GNU/Linux Applications?
Firefox, Pidgin, X-Chat, Gnome Do, Banshee, F-Spot, MonoDevelop, Evolution, Emacs, Midnight Commander, Monsoon and of course, Mono. There are probably many more that I am forgetting…
Why creating MONO?
As we were writing Evolution, we went through a lot of pain with building a very large, multi-threaded, multi-component application in C. As we were thinking “There must be a better way”, Microsoft came up with the C# language specification and the .NET specification. C# was fascinating as a language, specially for the kind of application that we were building, and .NET’s technology to integrate with other languages and to interoperate with other systems was of great interest to us. We wanted Linux to have as good as a developer platform as Windows developers were about to get. We have pretty much succeeded in this goal. The one thing that I regret is not having a working debugger for Mono earlier on.
What can we wait from MONO in a future?
It will grow in a number of areas: We will continue to bring Mono to more platforms and we will continue to tune it. Continue to innovate: Now that Mono is a viable .NET alternative, you have seen us innovate in many areas. We are no longer playing catch-up so we have started to address many new ideas and gaps from our community. For example we added SIMD support to Mono to help the gaming industry, static compilation to bring Mono to the iPhone, created an interactive C# interpreter and evaluator and much more.
We will continue to bring APIs that people need on an open source .NET implementation. We will continue our work to bring .NET not only to Linux users but users in other platforms.
And lastly, we will continue to work with developers in the open source .NET ecosystem to bring new technologies to the .NET/Mono space. For example a few years ago we wanted to get people to use Bittorrent for downloading files instead of using HTTP GET. We started a project through the Google Summer of Code that Alan McGovern did, and today BitSharp is used by many commercial companies to distribute their updates.
We also built a native client for Linux to use Alan’s great state-of-the-art bittorrent library. There will be many things like that. Performance and optimizations is something that we do routinely: we constantly monitor what Mono is doing wrong, or how it could do things better.
Are you now in other projects?
I mostly work on Mono and the Gtk# ecosystem, but we have branched out into a few other platforms. We now have Mono on the Wii and the PS3, so we have done work to help game developers use Mono on those platforms. We are also working on an easy-to-use and supported version of Mono for the iPhone that we should be announcing shortly.
Miguel de Icaza in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza
GNOME in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME
MONO in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)
Midnight Commander in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Commander
ubuntumagazine.org would like to THANKS to Miguel de Icaza for the nice interview. C de-Avillez ( website ) for spell/grammar check. The credits for the main photo (Miguel de Icaza at MySQL Conference 2005) goes to James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media - Wikipedia.
More articles in: Featured Articles, Interviews
Please, help us to keep this free project updated and alive. THANKYOU!
.Thankyou for listening!
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