I was referring both to Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman. One of them (MdI) is VP of Product Technology for Novell. The other is VP of Product Development. Your guess is as good as mine (probably, better) as to what they actually do. Incidentally, the Ximian group also developed Evolution. If one were sticking to projects that adhere to GPL3, you might have trouble finding an OS on which to run Gnome, or KDE. The last I saw, Linus was not too enthusiastic about GPL3.