Former Xamarin Co-founder Miguel de Icaza is Leaving Microsoft (zdnet.com) 32
Well-known open source advocate and developer Miguel de Icaza, who joined Microsoft in 2016 when it acquired Xamarin, the mobile-tool company he cofounded, is leaving Microsoft. From a report: De Icaza -- a Microsoft distinguished engineer -- confirmed to me on March 2 that he has decided to leave and will be taking some time off before moving to a new job. Ever since de Icaza's colleague and former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman left Microsoft in November 2021, there's been speculation that de Icaza also would leave Microsoft. Friedman was the CEO of Microsoft's GitHub division. Friedman said late last year he had decided to go back to his startup roots. De Icaza has been with Microsoft for just over six years. Most recently, he has been working on various AI projects with the ONNX team. ONNX, the Open Neural Network Exchange, is an evolving standard format for machine learning models that is being championed by Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. De Icaza worked with the team to get the ONNX runtime on Android and iOS to support mobile developers using Xamarin.
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"In this respect you could say his efforts had a lot of indirect impact, but negligible direct practical value."
Can any of us really say we had a direct impact on the world? Where we can say that You and definitively you caused a change that no one else could?
There are a small number of people who have created real change in the world, the rest of us are doing our best to indirectly trying to make things better.
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It's an interesting question, and obviously for every person it's going to be a different answer. I suppose we all sit on the shoulders of giants, and for most people making it through the week is probably at least a moderate accomplishment.
The one thing I will say about computer development, and probably about all forms of engineering, is that sometimes someone comes up with a real nifty idea, but practical applications are not readily evident. So it gets shoved on to a shelf until sometime later either th
It's about the restricted shares (Score:1)
Microsoft announces acquiring Xamarin Feb 24, 2016 and the co-founder leaves Microsoft nearly 6 years to the date later.
90% chance his last large set of restricted stock shares just vested and he sold them. /. should know better.
The other co-founder left in Nov 2021, 5.5 years after the acquisition.
Company acquires another, the acquired company's VP or higher get a 3 year set of restricted stock and maybe continue to work in the acquired business. After a couple years many of them are waiting till their st
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+1
(Best comment in the thread, clearly /. moderation nothing close to what it was 6 years ago.)
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And with .NET Core pretty much everything he did is now redundant
Uh...doesn't even .NET Core use Mono for Blazor WebAssembly?
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I'm just confused by the fact that we're talking about Miguel de Icaza on Slashdot and not one mention of GNOME in either the article, the summary, or the comments so far. His involvement with Mono/Ximian/Xamarin came about in the first place from his GNOME work.
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I remember that he managed to get 10 million dollars of funding for a Linux file manager (named Nautilus, IIRC) back in those heady days of the original dot-com bubble.
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I remember that he managed to get 10 million dollars of funding for a Linux file manager (named Nautilus, IIRC) back in those heady days of the original dot-com bubble.
Right, and Nautilus is the GNOME file manager. So still a bit weird that GNOME wasn't mentioned. It's like there was an article on Linus Torvalds that talked about him only as the founder of the Git project. Or Larry Wall and it only talked about him as the creator of rn or patch.... Actually, I suppose that's a pretty bad example since, for programmers of a certain era, that might be a more significant thing to know him for. How about Steve Wozniak only for Wheels of Zeus? Or Steve Ballmer for absolutely a
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Like mentioning Steve Ballmer and only referring to his ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers, perchance?
I totally agree that the GNOME omission was weird.
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Like mentioning Steve Ballmer and only referring to his ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers, perchance?
Well... In reality, yes... but, no! Ballmer should be known, always, for the DEVELOPERS! dance first and foremost.
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Yeah, lacking the mention of the most used OSS desktop in the world is pretty odd.
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I'm just confused by the fact that we're talking about Miguel de Icaza on Slashdot and not one mention of GNOME
Yes. Seeing his name is a blast from the past. I think he was a major dev for Gnumeric, if not *the* dev. Hoping he finds his path.
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He denounced the Linux and GNOME community some time ago, after having switched to MacOS. I think in reality he was perhaps more interested in the Network Object Model part of GNOME than the GNU and desktop Environment part. And the whole CORBA thing turned out to be a big mistake that others had to clean up.
When he decided to start Mono, you could really feel the clash inside the community - GNOME was a C project, Windows was the main competitor, and a pretty hostile one, and he was like, hey, I just disco
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I do remember from the mailing lists just how much of the discussion was on the object model. Regardless of the direction he may have taken later, it's still really odd that it wasn't mentioned.
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I was going to bring up Ximian, aka Helix Code. That was a lot of effort and talent to take what Gnome was technically capable of and provide a great UX at the time. I recall being a big fan of the usability aspect of what they provided with that effort. Like many solid startups, it was absorbed by a larger organization and never realized its full potential.
Former co-founder? (Score:2)
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I was going to comment the same thing. Also you can never become a co-founder of a company later, unless it's Tesla.
https://www.timesnownews.com/b... [timesnownews.com]
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