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____/ Miguel de Icaza on Wednesday 13 May 2009 16:08 : \____
> 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.
"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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_icaza
Wikipedia is not always accurate; if it's not, let's correct it, shall we? :-)
> 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.
Yes, I know about that.
> 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".
Thanks. That clarifies some more, but I already knew that you had written some
Free software prior to the interview. In your interview with Christian you
talked about using GNU, but I'm not so sure to what extent you worked with
Linux. I know you did some UNIX.
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