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Technology Review Profiles Miguel de Icaza
prostoalex writes "Technology Review has a feature story on Miguel de Icaza, currently Novell VP of Product Technology, but more known as the leader of Gnome and Mono projects. Miguel is the man Don Box would like to see joining Microsoft for his "amazing amount of raw energy". If you read through the Technology review article, you will see that de Icaza was actually turned down by Microsoft at some point."
I met Miguel, like, back in '98 at a conference in Mexico. Yes, Linux existed there back then!
We chatted and I quickly found he was more than just a Rob Malda or Rusty Foster, guys who talk the talk and get all the fame but can't back it up when it comes to lines of code per hour counts.
Miguel simply AMAZED me with his knowledge and skill. He ever opened up a digital projector and messed with the PROM or jumpers or something and fixed it within 20 minutes, just in time for his talk.
de Icaza is nothing short of amazing. I DO however question his judgement to kind of jump into the MS camp with MONO/.NET emulation, but I know that since he's smarter than me he must be doing the right thing.
If you liked my post,
i seem to recall a Slashdot sig or two quoting Miguel saying that he was a MS clipy fan.
/.'er would burn at the stake a man who had said so, but think for a sec before torching up those flames, kids.
...your world is *not* ruined by this man: change your config....ye that bitch and moan how easy it is to twiddle this and that in /etc/here or /etc/there. Yeah, i'm good with that, but gramps is not - what can he use? Gnome. Or Kde.
Many a
Clippy might have sucked and annoyed many of you, but think about those moments when grammy was looking about for a movie of the grandkids.
i know, i know...stretch, strech, but ponder for me your grand parents for a sec: what do they read/write/view email with? Yeah, l33tz as you may be, gramps needs some some help from time to time: Gnome does that. Period.
Gripe and bitch on the 'spatial this' and 'spatial that'
Save the zealotous mass, either is good, but Clippy has helped many a folk get "email"...your ub3r ass needs to realize these are not the folks that care for or about your sendmail/qmail/rfc gripes....they want the pics of the little grandkids.
Rip on Miguel as you like, but recall, this is a man that wants the linux desktop to prosper, regardless of what fanboy, ub3r wannabies latch on.
Let the quote go....listen to the spirit...you do want me to listen to the open source spirit don't you?
I'd like to thank Miguel for his contributions. I'm a gnome user, and it is quite nice. What I don't get though, is why he seems absolutely fascinated with the boys in redmond. He reimplements Outlook, and now he's reimplimenting their reimplimentation of Java. Why not get behind an OSS implementation of the original ala kaffe or gcj, or push the OSS own Parrot?
[...] de Icaza took the interview as an opportunity to lecture managers on why Microsoft should abandon its multibillion-dollar business model and embrace open-source programming. Not surprisingly, de Icaza wasn't hired.
The blurb here makes it sound like he was begging on his knees for them to take him on. Not quite what the article describes. He's not the least "confused on what side he's on".
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
These are baseless accusations. I would suggest you keep the conspiracy theories to yourself unless you have some evidence to back them up.
Maybe you are actually someone hired by Microsoft to spread FUD on slashdot!
Miguel's a leader of the community who deserves our respect. I think it's become clear over the years he could have made as much money as he wanted but chose to do what he felt was right.
A lot of people denigrate Miguel as being a "Microsoft fan."
That's not fair. What he is, is a realist. The fact is that as long as Microsoft has a vast majority of the desktops out there, any competing system has a choice: between creating their own 31337 world where only the initiated may play, or instead creating systems that work and play well with others. By paying close attention to what system and paradigms users are used to - that is to say, that Microsoft ships - Miguel helps furhter the rapid adoption of Linux as a viable Windows alternative.
Why he is imporant is not just that he realizes this, but that he does something about it. Real hackers write code for their beliefs, as he does.
Why do so many people around here seem to think that Java is more free than .Net? This is far from true.
Java is just as patent-encumbered as .Net is. Hell, Sun sued *Microsoft* over some Java patents shortly ago. Who is to say they wouldn't do the same to gcj if it served their interests?
In fact, it is argueable that it is moreso since a single, commercial body controls it (Sub) whereas with .Net at least you have a standards body (ECMA) who has ratified the spec, which means that an independant implementation of the spec API (Mono) is less likely to have problems than an independant implimentation of the Java API.
The reality is that everyone is against .Net soley because it is made by MS. Yay for groupthink!.
Some languages map very nicely to the JVM or the CLR
/clr flag which is a very convenient
(the same developer that did Jython now has
a very fast implementation called IronPython that
was unveiled and demostrated at OSCON).
The problem is with languages that require pointers:
Fortran, C, C++ and some extra support is convenient
for some functional languages that the CLR
provides.
I mean, nothing really ground breaking, but the
CLR had a chance to learn from Java's limitations.
The new MS C++ compiler generates pure CIL executables
when using the
way of integrating existing C/C++ codebases with
managed codebases.
Miguel.
Microsoft software architect Don Box even wrote a song imploring de Icaza to join the company and sang it to him in front of a large audience at a party late last year.
Maybe they should have just used a stunt by Steve Ballmer instead?
Steve (onstage): "Miguel, you're a great developer... DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
- sm
For me it is difficult to put my finger on exactly what has hampered Java's uptake in the general open source community.
/usr/share, libraries in /usr/lib and so on, why can't Java?
It's unlikely to be only one reason. These issues are big, complex with many aspects, and every developer that has made a choice in this field probably have their own unique blend of reasons.
For me, it has come down to a few things, but these hase tended to change as well.
I started playing with Java looong ago, like 1995ish, and actually wrote a small app as part of a summer job (which didn't really go anywhere). It was pretty horrible at the time. A big problem was that we were doing client-side apps, with an UI, and with Java and its UI libs, our then modern machines ended up with the performance of a CBM64, but with far uglier user interface. I still have dreams about that experience after a night with too much beer and rich food.
Today, the performance is better. Using Swing (is it? I mix them up), it tends to look better as well. But: any UI is still uncoupled from the rest of my desktop. I have my nice AA fonts everywhere - except in a Java app, which uses its own font settings and no AA. Controls, cutting and pasting and so on also reinforces that the app is just a free-floating guest on my machine and is not integrated one bit. Also, the runtime takes a _lot_ of resources - on disk and in memory. There sould be no need for that, really - all other VM:s I have (mono, perl, python) seem far less resource hungry.
Oh, and the install is also "too good" for my machine, and plonks down itself in its own private directory, not deigning to play nice with the rest of the machine. If all my other apps can have common resources in
OK, this sounds like a litany. It's not that bad, but you wanted to know why people aren't enamoured with Java the way they seem to become about mono, and this is my personal (partial) answer. In short, I write a GTK# app in mono, and it feels like a natural part of my desktop. I write it in Java, and it feels like an intruder.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
OMG.
i'm picking on you because you exemplify superbly what's true of most of this thread, and half the posts on this story: intense fanboyism. you deduced that he was a great coder from a short conversation? what'd he do, spend the whole time reciting the Mono headers? great coder, lousy conversationalist. you can't figure out how good a coder someone is without looking at their code ! and we'll ignore for the moment this flatly stupid idea that LoC/hr is some measure of a coder's skill. all the "he's nothing short of amazing" stuff just doesn't "take" without some rationale behind it, all of which is totally missing from most of the fanboy posts. "he's smarter than me, he must know what he's doing" is triangulated somewhere between funny, stupid, and dangerous. reserve judgment for people with a proven track record, but even Ken and Dennis make mistakes.
and, speaking of track records, anyone know what the current score is for people or organizations that try to "play nice" with our "friends" in Redmond? (hint: it ain't pretty)
i'm amazed by both the number of "he's the only one that gets it" (c'mon, the only one? there's an awful lot of bright people out there) and "he just doesn't get it" posts. people on both sides seem really animated. i've never met the guy, but most people i know who have ended up kinda violently opposed to him. what is it about the guy that inspires such strong emotion? is it just the fact that he's working on topics that touch on sensitive areas for many FS/OS folks (MS, and playing nice with them)? or is de Icaza the new RMS (people seem to have mostly mellowed about him)?
i've got mod points, and i was gonna try to even this thread out some, but i couldn't figure out where the -1 Fanboy rating was.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.