Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972)[1] is a Mexican-American programmer and activist, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects.

[7] 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.

[11] De Icaza started the GNOME project with Federico Mena in August 1997 to create a completely free desktop environment and component model for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

In 1999, de Icaza, along with Nat Friedman, co-founded Helix Code, a GNOME-oriented free software company that employed a large number of other GNOME hackers.

In May 2011, de Icaza started Xamarin to replace MonoTouch and Mono for Android after Novell was bought by Attachmate and the projects were abandoned.

De Icaza specifically criticized a generally developer-focused culture, lack of backward compatibility, and fragmentation among the various Linux distributions.

[21][22] In March 2013, de Icaza announced on his personal blog that he regularly used macOS instead of Linux for desktop computing.

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.