“There’s a sense of dissonance in the office of Miguel de Icaza.
On one hand, here is the celebrated hacker—as in programming
whiz, not virtual trespasser—wearing a T-shirt, looking
boyish and rail-thin, and resembling an impoverished graduate
student who has been living on coffee. But here also is the vice
president of product technology for staid software giant Novell,
entirely at ease as he takes command of a plush corporate
conference room in Cambridge, MA, with a view of the Charles River
and the Boston skyline. It’s a dissonance, however, that de Icaza
is quick to wave away. ‘There are a lot of motivations in the
open-source community, like the freedom to choose software
platforms and the chance to innovate,’ he says, referring to the
global community of programmers who write software that others are
free to download and modify. ‘Now one of my motivations is that I’m
being paid to do this, and I have to deliver products…'”