Funny, I never took it to be nose-thumbing so much as fellatio. He's the Pied Piper of Hamelin who led a small army of open source programmers straight to their language and APIs just when the townsfolk were at the peak of panic that they were losing the mindshsre of developers. (...developers, developers, developers,...) That's an act of deep love, not defiance.
Well, as deep as as a quid pro quo seeker might feel, anyway. He certainly never came off as an idealist.
In the Summer of 1997 my friend Randy Chapman invited me to interview at the Microsoft Internet Explorer for Solaris on the SPARC (because of my background in the Linux/SPARC port). I went to interview to Microsoft that summer and met both Randy Chapman and Nat Friedman for the first time in person. We had known for a long time from the LinuxNet IRC network.
At Microsoft I learned the truth about ActiveX and COM and I got very interested in it inmediately. Upon my return to Mexico Federico and I started to design a GUI control infrastructure for Unix that we code named `GNOME'.
I'm seriously confused here. Is this the same guy who thumbed his nose at Microsoft and instigated the creation Mono?
If so, isn't he at least a little conflicted about the closed nature of the platform?