After takin' a swig o' grog, Miguel de Icaza belched out
this bit o' wisdom:
> Hello,
>
>> You've entered a different universe, but then again, your escapades in
>> Linux pretty much began when you went to Microsoft asking for a job (late
>> 90s).
>
> Not sure what that is supposed to mean.
>
> But as usual, you do not know much about my trip to Microsoft. I figured
> maybe I should get the record straight before you go on reporting another
> "10%" of trivia as "100%" facts.
>
> I started writing free software in 1992, five years before I went to
> Microsoft to interview at the IE/SPARC team at the time. By that time I
> had contributed patches to Wine, I had written the Midnight Commander, I
> was maintaining libc for the SPARC, had contributed to one of the free
> efforts to bring AWT to the free Java (Kaffe), the "sawt" toolkit and was
> an active kernel contributor to Linux on the SPARC, had authored several
> device drivers, I was probably working on RAID and I had sent my first KDE
> patch.
>
> I was already getting more interested in the desktop that the kernel work.
>
> Microsoft in 1997 sounded interesting. A good friend of mine that was
> one of the original developers that ported Sun's Java to Linux had
> finished college and went to work for Microsoft (this is back when Sun did
> not support Linux, but licensed it under NDA to whoever wanted it,
> and a team of folks on irc got together and ported it; Randy was the
> maintainer).
>
> Randy knew me from my work on Linux on the SPARC, and he was working on
> the IE team and invited me to interview to Microsoft. It was a great to
> meet Randy in person and Nat Friedman (another one of the early people
> that actually *contributed* to improve Linux).
>
> There was no `open source' term at the time, but I did ask the team
> manager for them to port IE to Linux and to effectively open source it.
> They did not know much about Linux at the time, but they said "you are
> free to port IE to whatever system you want in your spare time".
>
> Miguel
(reformatted for readability)
--
Never look up when dragons fly overhead.
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