A Linux Tale [PDF]

MIT's Technology Review has a different Linux tale in their September issue. Usually Linux stories fawn over Torvalds, and tells the legendary tale of how he innocently lit a fire under the open source movement with his namesake OS. This MIT TR article however is different -- in this, the first part of a two part story, titled, 'The Linux Revolution,' Torvalds gets a passing mention in order to focus on Miguel de Icaza -- who to some, is the new face of Open Source, and to others, the sellout. De Icaza's first claim to fame was in the writing of a file management program for Linux, then launching the open source effort to create a GUI for Linux named GNOME and finally cofounding Ximian -- now part of Novell. Ximian was created to write software, named Mono, that would easily translate code from the Windows platform to Linux and vice versa. That all sounds great -- but there is that Novell part -- de Icaza sold Ximian to Novell. That's when he lost some friends. Some see his sellout as a sellout of the open source movement -- de Icaza see's it as getting his open source baby faster to market by leveraging on the deep pockets and maturity of a large organization. Read more in MIT's TR.