Miguel de Icaza

Early years

De Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied Mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), but dropped out before getting a degree to work in IT. He came from a family of scientists in which his father is a physicist and his mother a biologist. He started writing free software in 1992.

Early software career

One of the earliest pieces of software he wrote for Linux was the Midnight Commander file manager in 1994, a text-mode file manager. He was also one of the early contributors to the Wine project.

He worked with David S. Miller on the Linux SPARC port and wrote several of the video and network drivers in the port, as well as the libc ports to the platform. They both later worked on extending Linux for MIPS to run on SGI's Indy computers and wrote the original X drivers for the system. With Ingo Molnár he wrote the original software implementation of RAID-1 and RAID-5 drivers of the Linux kernel.

In summer of 1997, he was interviewed by Microsoft for a job in the Internet Explorer Unix team (to work on a SPARC port), but lacked the university degree required to obtain a work H-1B visa. He said in an interview that he tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did so with their own browser.

De Icaza has had cameo appearances in the 2001 motion pictures Antitrust and The Code.

He married Maria Laura Soares da Silva (now Maria Laura de Icaza) in 2003. They have three children. He has been living in the state of Massachusetts for 20 years.

De Icaza and his wife are critical of the actions of the state of Israel towards the Palestinians in the Middle East and has blogged about the subject and visited the area of conflict as well.

.NET Foundation director

In 2014 he joined Anders Hejlsberg on stage during the announcements of the.NET Foundation and the open sourcing of Microsoft's C# Compiler. He went on to serve on the board of directors of the.NET Foundation.