Summary: A little history lesson about GNOME and Miguel de Icaza, who exploited unhappiness/concerns about the licence of Qt (the building blocks of KDE) to push a GTK-based alternative whilst also exploring working for Microsoft

THE Microsoft employee (and prior to that Microsoft mole) Miguel de Icaza can be seen in the Debian-Private archives of 1997. It started with "Debian services for GNOME" and became a massive thread regarding "giving money to gnome" (or to KDE).

We've examined the contents of some of these E-mails; that gives a glimpse into what surrounded the Qt controversy (likely to be revived soon). "Qt" is mentioned in the subject line of 52 messages of this archive (e.g. "let's dump Qt", "FreeQt", "RMS on enforcing against Qt", "qt license", "building a free replacement for Qt" to quote just subject lines, KDE excluded). Here's an outline of stuff about GNOME:

As per Wikipedia: "In summer of 1997, he [de Icaza] 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. He said in an interview that he tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did so with their own browser."

That's just a few months before the E-mails above. As people noted in the thread, Debian's rival was Microsoft, not Red Hat. Why give that much access to someone so loyal to Microsoft? Craving a job at Microsoft...

Less than a decade later he helped engineer the Microsoft/Novell patent deal (an attack on the GPL, attack on GNU/Linux at large). Richard Stallman called him a "traitor". But was he ever loyal (at all) to Free software? ⬆